Tag Archives: year A

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Preaching On Creation: Sunday October 9-15 in Year A (Ormseth)

It Is God’s Will – Dennis Ormseth reflects on joining with the Lord, Servant of Creation, in unending care of creation.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday October 9-15, Year A (2011, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

Isaiah 25:1-9
Psalm 23
Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14

This is the Feast of Victory for our God!

The coupling of the parable of “The Wedding Banquet” from Matthew 22:1-14 with this Sunday’s first lesson from Isaiah 25 suggests that the parable must be understood as referring to the messianic banquet. Reading these texts together in Christian worship, however, raises a difficult question for those who rejoice in God’s love for all creation.

A verse of one of the canticles of praise sung by Lutheran congregations at the opening of eucharistic worship expresses the expectation that all of creation joins in the feast that celebrates the triumph of God over all evil:

“This is the feast of victory for our God.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
. . . Sing with all the people of God,
and join in the hymn of all creation. . . .”

The liturgy “Now the Feast and Celebration” makes the point even more emphatically: “Now the feast and celebration, all of creation sings for joy.” We have urged this perspective upon our readers at every opportunity in this series of comments on the readings for Year A of the lectionary. That the “Parable of the Wedding Banquet” suggests a markedly less inclusive vision might therefore give us pause concerning this expectation. The refusal of the invitation by a whole host of humans, coupled with the final exclusion of a person brought in from the streets because he is not appropriately dressed, tends to lessen our confidence in the inclusiveness of God’s victorious love. What, then, really counts for inclusion or exclusion in the great feast? Why is the proper wedding garment the crucial factor related to inclusion? And what actually is this exclusion about?

Why the inclusion and then the exclusion?

In Bernard Brandon Scott’s view, Matthew’s version of the parable of the “Man Who Gave a Banquet” needs to be read in sequence with Matthew’s earlier parables of “A Man had Two Sons” and “A Man Planted a Vineyard.” In the progression of the three parables, Matthew “sketches out his vision of the kingdom and its coming,” which represents an “ideology of salvation history” and which “concludes, on the one hand, that Israel has rejected God’s messengers and, on the other, that the church’s good fruits show forth that it is the true Israel.” At the same time, however, this progression undercuts the apparent verisimilitude of the parables, which removes the cause of offence taken at the rejection of the man having no wedding garment. Matthew simply wants to make clear, Scott suggests, “as is most evident in his Great Judgment scene (Matt 25:31-46),” that “if grace calls, the threat of no fruits remains for judgment.” The man without a wedding garment is a man “without the fruits of the kingdom” (Scott, Hear Then the Parable, pp. 162-63).

The key to the series of parables is that we join God in care for all creation.

Our reading of the parables of these last several Sundays, while making use of Scott’s suggestion that Matthew undercuts their verisimilitude, also supplants the ideology of salvation history with a theology of care of creation. We would accordingly include in this progression the parable of “the laborers in the vineyard,” the point of which, we suggested (following Scott and Norman Wirzba), is that “God’s generosity privileges the call to work in the vineyard over the wage paid, because work in the vineyard is the more essential blessing” (See our comment on the readings for last Sunday). God’s call to work in the vineyard of creation is a principle motif of the entire sequence, which invites us to enter into “‘the noble activity of presenting to God a creation strengthened and restored through the exercise of our hands, heart and head.” The invitation is “’to join God in the divine work of cultivating and maintaining a garden (Gen. 2:8-9). It is to enter into the flow of the divine beneficence and hospitality’” (See our comment on the readings for Lectionary 25.  The quote is from Wirzba, The Paradise of God, p. 155).

Accordingly, the parable of “A Man had Two Sons,” while also part of the ideology of salvation history in which the church becomes the “true Israel,” in this reading can be seen to imply that the Son who actually went to the vineyard and engaged in its care is the true Servant of the creation. Our reading of the parable of “A Man Planted a Vineyard,” furthermore, enlarges the scope of this line of interpretation by drawing on the primary vineyard texts of Isaiah 5:1-7 and Matthew 21:33-46 for development of the metaphor: those who reject the son reject their role as caretakers of the vineyard; and the new tenants who replace them are those who reclaim the heritage of the Son and join him in the work of restoring the creation, a near parallel to the Gospel for this Sunday.

Warren Carter explains the connection: like the harvesting of good fruits, “feasting and eating indicate participation in God’s purposes.” The readings of Isaiah 25:1-9 and Psalm 23 serve to illustrate and underscore the point: the “meal also symbolizes the yet-future completion of God’s purposes when God’s empire will be established in full. Isaiah envisions God’s future triumphant return to Zion, where God will make “for all peoples a feast of rich food. . . . In the parable those who refuse to attend the wedding celebration are excluded, while those who come participate in God’s purposes.” The man who comes without a wedding garment, fails “to discern and honor the authority and goodness of the king,” and therefore suffers the worst imaginable consequences because “to be called and chosen means honoring God (22:37-39) and doing God’s will (7:24-27; 12:46-50) until the judgment” (Carter, Matthew and the Margins, p. 434).

Just as we join the Lord in care for the poor and distress, so also we join the Lord, the Servant of Creation in unending care for God’s creation.

Brandon Scott’s treatment of this parable, which he renames “’What If No One Came?” provides an additional insight worthy of mention here. The banquet, he argues, along with the excuses, which allude to a list of reasons for refusing to participate in holy war, add to the reader’s expectation that this is the messianic banquet that celebrates victory over the Lord’s enemies. But strangely, the meal in the parable “never escalates to the expected messianic banquet, because the master is powerless to attack those who have snubbed him.” Furthermore, the master “loses his upper-class status and must join those who live in the streets.” In contrast to the passage from Isaiah, in which “the poor and distressed receive new value from being associated with God,” in the parable, the “householder cannot raise the poor up but must himself join them.” Perhaps this is the way the Servant of Creation would have originally told the parable. If Matthew, on the other hand, insists on the necessity of vengeance to restore the king’s honor, the point is well taken: it is God’s will that we join with the Lord, the Servant of Creation, in unending care of creation!

Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2011.
dennisormseth@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Preaching On Creation: Sunday October 2-8 in Year A (Ormseth)

A Parable about Caring for Creation – Dennis Ormseth reflects on the parable of the vineyard.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday October 2-8, Year A (2011, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

Isaiah 5:1-7
Psalm 80:7-15
Philippians 3:4b-14
Matthew 21:33-46

The readings for this Sunday after Pentecost remind us that, according to God’s purpose, the life of God’s people is securely grounded in the Earth. Our first reading, the Psalm, and the Gospel all have in common a key metaphor that brings this home, the metaphor of the vineyard:

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel,
And the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; (Isaiah 5:1-7).

You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it. You cleared the ground for it; it took deep root and filled the land (Psalm 80:8-9)

Listen to another parable.  There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. . . (Matthew 21:33-34).

In Walter Brueggemann’s judgment, the Song of the Vineyard in our first lesson is the “paradigmatic use of the metaphor in the Old Testament.” And the Parable of Matthew 21:33-41 is correspondingly “the most extended and complex usage of the imagery in the New Testament” (Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, p. 257). In the commentary for these lessons, we explore the significance of this metaphor for our call to care for creation.

God’s relationship to the vineyard parallels to God’s relationship to creation.

We have encountered the metaphor of the vineyard before in our reading of the selections from the Gospel of Matthew, most recently with the texts for Lectionary 25, with the parable of the “laborers in the vineyard.” There we pictured a God who cares passionately about his vineyard and is pleased to call laborer after laborer to the good work of caring for it. As the landowner explains to the laborers who criticize the equal pay they received for unequal time spent at labor, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” As we suggested, God’s generosity privileges the call to work in the vineyard over the wage paid, because work in the vineyard is the more essential blessing. While both Isaiah’s Song of the Vineyard and Matthew’s rendering of the parable of “the wicked tenants’ evoke this same level of concern for the vineyard, these narratives also draw the reader into the deep anguish of God over what happens to the vineyard, when its inhabitants refuse to engage in their work in a righteous manner.

God is invested in the vineyard as gardener and vinekeeper.

In Isaiah’s narrative, God is envisioned, not as the manager of the vineyard but as its “Gardener-Vinedresser,” an image which links the narrative to the garden in the story of creation in Genesis 2, and as Brueggemann suggests, “connotes fruitfulness and the full function of creation (Num 24:6).” As the use of the metaphor in the accompanying Psalm 80 makes explicit, the image also links the story to the narrative of the Exodus, as it was expressed already in Exodus 15:17: “You brought them in and planted them on the mountain of your possession, the place, O Lord, that you made your abode, the sanctuary, O Lord, that your hands have established” (Ibid., p. 255). God’s investment in the vineyard is made absolutely clear in the detailed accounting of the planting. The digging, the clearing of stones, the selection of choice vines, and the building of a watchtower all provide detailed substance for the claim reflected in the anguished question of v. 4a:  “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it?”

The gardener’s expectations are high and his disappointments are great.

The gardener’s expectations are high: the vat for the wine has been hewn out and is ready to receive the fruit. The gardener’s disappointment is equally great: “When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” (5:4b). And his action is correspondingly astonishing. With no thought to trying another variety in another season (the standard modern gardener’s perennial response to a disappointing crop), the gardener resolves to destroy the whole vineyard: 

“I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns;
I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.”

So serious for the gardener is this failure to produce good fruit. The gardener’s response goes beyond the passionate concern that the vineyard be well tended; he is angry enough to bring to bear the full weight of both enemy armies and cosmic forces against the vineyard and its occupants, an anger that is sustained, in the prophet’s telling,  until “the tongue of fire devours the stubble, and as dry grass sinks down in the flame, so their root will become rotten, and their blossom go up like dust” (6:24a). Why so great and consuming anger? “For they have rejected the instruction of the Lord of hosts, and have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel” (6:24b).

Brueggemann notes that the metaphor of the gardener-vinedresser is what he calls a “metaphor of sustenance,” contrasted with “metaphors of governance,” according to which God is imaged as “one who nurtures, evokes, values, and enhances life,” as opposed to the concern “to maintain a viable order in which life is possible for Israel and for all of creation” (Ibid., p. 250).  But it seems then that there is a certain unexpected wildness about this gardener. The vine and the vineyard together are destroyed in his cataclysmic fury! What are we to make of this?

Justice and care for the vineyard go hand in hand.

That the Song of the Vineyard has reference to the experience of the people of Israel in exile is obvious, of course; and the agenda of the prophet concerns not gardening but the lack of political and economic justice on the part of the leadership. The sour grapes that so anger the gardener are the unjust and uncaring actions of those leaders. As Brueggemann observes, the metaphor of the gardener and his garden or vineyard is:

“able to express both the destructive potential of Yahweh against a recalcitrant object of love, and the remarkable generosity of Yahweh, which becomes the source of hope for rehabilitation in time of displacement.  In the midst of destructive potential and remarkable generosity, we note that the gardener-vinedresser has firm, clear, nonnegotiable expectations for the vine” (p. 257).

But the metaphor guarantees that the fate of the vineyard cannot be separated from that of the vine. The vine and the vineyard are of one piece; people and land are caught up together in the destruction that the leaders of the people have brought upon them all. It comes, surely, of the deep rootedness of the people in the land, a rootedness that perhaps only a gardener who has dug soil, cleared stones, and planted with expensive “choice vines” can fully appreciate. 

Social justice and environmental concerns are inseparably linked.

Contemporary readers concerned with care of creation might see in this a warning that social justice and environmental concern are inseparably linked, however remote the connections may appear to be on the surface. This would suggest, at the least, that neither social justice nor environmental restoration should be pursued in isolation from or at the expense of the other; eventually the linkage will make itself manifest. We might also be struck by the fact that the vineyard, once so carefully tended by God, is, as it were, to be turned back into wasteland or wilderness. No wall shuts out wild animals; no knife or hoe disturbs whatever grows there; and it matters not that drought parches the land. There is an ironic sense of justice to this:  after all the care God extended, the vineyard yield’s only wild grapes. And so the land is returned to wilderness. It was Thoreau who famously said, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” and the idea is perhaps no more prophetic than it is apt as a basis for setting aside tracts of land called “wilderness.” The wildness that haunts our culture’s disregard of calls for social and eco-justice pertains to energies that are far more comprehensive and threatening than anything that can be designated as a preserve. Such ideas need to be used carefully, of course, as has been demonstrated lately by the claims of politicians to know just exactly what “sins” are responsible for the environmental “wildness” we are experiencing globally in recent times. They seldom seem to have in mind acts of injustice that involve our relationship to the Earth. But the return of the land to wildness as envisioned here echoes themes from the story of Noah; and there is perhaps a sense that land degraded by human misuse needs to “go wild” and be devoid of human habitation before it is ready to be inhabited once again in the expectation of good fruit.

Does Jesus see the significance of the metaphor of the vineyard similarly? Brueggemann calls attention to the fact that in Matthew 21:33-41, the image is again “potentially positive toward Israel and a witness to Yahweh’s attentive generosity” but is “utilized as an assertion of judgment:  “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time” (Matt 21:41). But there are interesting and perhaps significant differences in the details, as well. First of all, the gardener has become an absentee landowner, who lets out his vineyard to tenants. This social and economic distance opens up the possibility for people to have an impersonal financial interest in the vineyard; and the actions of the tenants seem to confirm this as part of Jesus’ understanding. They do not have the investment in the vineyard that the gardener does; they are not concerned about producing good fruits as much as they are concerned to gain control over the property, even though they acknowledge that it is another’s “heritage” they covet. Indeed, they both dishonor the owner and ignore whatever purposes he might have for the vineyard.

Warren Carter argues that the parable “utilizes a struggle over land and resources to raise questions about ownership and just use” as part of salvation history. Thus the parable:

“evokes a dominant economic practice of the Greco-Roman world where high rents, civic and religious taxes, acquiring seed and feed for the next crop and for livestock, and the need to trade or barter for other goods not produced on a farm, made subsistence existence difficult for many. The religious elite as tenants experience not only the desperation many experienced, but the desperation they helped to cause” (Carter, Matthew and the Margins:  A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, p. 427).

 Especially telling is their treatment of the son and heir; in killing him they destroy any possibility of the son taking charge of the vineyard and restoring it in accordance with the landowner’s purposes. The linkage between owner, people, and land implicit in the metaphor of the vineyard but weakened in the commercial transaction of renting, is thus willfully broken. The consequence again seems quite astonishing, if at the outset we assume that the landowner represents God. In Carter’s view, the “vineyard remains intact, owned by its owner. It is the tenants who are punished by losing their position as its caretakers,” a punishment which, Carter suggests, is “understood to happen in Jerusalem’s defeat by Rome in 70 C.E.” (Ibid., p. 429). 

We learn the fate of the land owners, but what about the fate of the vineyard?

This conclusion seems strange in the mouth of Jesus. And Bernard Brandon Scott is less certain about the fate of the vineyard. The threat of displacement is, after all, first voiced by the authorities, for whom this is an entirely ordinary way of thinking. With allusions to the patriarchal stories of Joseph, however, and to the conflict over inheritance classically represented by the story of Esau and Jacob, the fact that the parable “provides no ready identification models, no clear metaphorical referencing, an audience is left in a precarious position: In the plot, the kingdom fails and the inheritance is in doubt.”  Even worse, the parable seems to recall Matthew 11:12, “From the days of John the Baptist the kingdom of heaven is breaking out by violence and violent men are raping it.” The “kingdom is an object of violence. The owner is a fool, the tenants are bandits, and the messengers are beaten or murdered. . . [The]  parable challenges the predictability of the kingdom’s heirs as good and the apocalyptic assumption that the kingdom’s true heirs will in the end triumph.  In the parable, the final fate of the vineyard is unresolved because the owner is still alive, but no evidence is given for its eventual liberation.  The owner’s fate may be that of his son.” (Scott, Hear Then the Parable, pp. 252-53.)

Following this line of interpretation leads inevitably to the question whether Jesus (or Matthew) intends to prefigure Jesus’ death in the telling of the parable in the face of his opponents, who are in fact the party that will be responsible for his death. For reading of the parable in Christian worship, this identification seems inescapable. The one who first enters our company at worship appears in the narrative of the Psalm as “one at your right hand,” on whom the hand of God will rest, “the one whom you made strong for yourself” and then reappears here as the son sent by the father from a far country. And so the fate of the vineyard is made to lie in the same grave as the son, awaiting some great reversal at the end of the story.

 The caretakers reject God’s purposes for the vineyard, and we reject God’s purposes for creation!

Again we can ask, what does all this mean for care of creation? Carter comes close to what we think it means when he writes that this parable of the vineyard “repeats the condemnation of the religious leaders by depicting the fateful consequences of their persistent rejection of God’s purposes, especially in Jesus the son. They are rejected as caretakers of the vineyard. It identifies another group to take over the role of the displaced leaders as God’s agents to ensure the fruitfulness of the vineyard Israel” (Carter, p. 426).

Finding good caretakers for the vineyard is what this is about. However, as we have seen above, people and vineyard are not that easily separated. Or to put it differently, they are only separated so easily in the covetous minds of the thieving tenants and in the coveting minds of those incensed authorities who proclaim that the tenants should be replaced! But the ambiguity of the parable suggests another reason to resist Carter’s conclusion and to close the gap of the imagination with this:

The parable of the vineyard is about caring for creation.

If the landowner is God the creator and Jesus his beloved son, then the Vineyard is not simply the limited space of Israel but extends to the whole creation that God loves. And the new tenants are those who will care for that vineyard as the passionate gardener would care for it, or indeed as his son will, when he returns from the wildness beyond the broken walls to reclaim his heritage and restore both the vine and all others, with their vineyard, their proper places in the Earth. Isn’t this very likely what Jesus’ anticipated in saying, The Kingdom of God will be . . . given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom”? (Matthew 21:44).

God’s relationship to the vineyard parallels to God’s relationship to creation.

God is invested in the vineyard as gardener and vinekeeper.

The gardener’s expectations are high and his disappointments are great.

Justice and care for the vineyard go hand in hand.

Social justice and environmental concerns are inseparably linked.

The caretakers reject God’s purposes for the vineyard, and we reject God’s purposes for creation!

The parable of the vineyard is about caring for creation.

Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2011.
dennisormseth@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Preaching on Creation: Sunday September 25 – October 1 in Year A (Santmire)

Things Fall Apart: One Center Holds – Paul Santmire reflects on a counter-cultural alternative to a consumer economy.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday September 25 – October 1, Year A (2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32
Psalm 25:1-9
Philippians 2:1-13
Matthew 21:23-32

Some of the most quoted lines of poetry in the modern era are these, from the poem “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939):

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

These words have not lost their claim on us, as we hesitate to open the daily paper or turn on the news, for fear that some new political or ecological disaster is upon us. Think of the Cuban missile crisis or the events of 9/11 or the increasing number of disastrous droughts or tsunamis around the world.

Sadly, things may be worse than we realize. Never mind the loud noise of world history, which Yeats seemed to have in mind. We also are faced with a quiet crisis (Stewart Udall), which appears to be even more insidious. Call this the Walmart crisis.  In a sense, Walmart rules the world, from rural America to urban China, and back again. Our lives, or the lives of many of us, and the lives of many around the world are focused on getting more things. Ours is the world of global consumerism.  Consumerism makes the world go ‘round.

The problem is—to cite some innocuous sounding words from the Yeats poem—“Things fall apart.” Consumerism has its costs, and they are indeed costly. Think of the Pacific Ocean.  Discarded things that have fallen apart—garbage, it’s called—form a kind of floating island in the Pacific that’s bigger than the state of Texas.

And worse. The “throw away culture” of global consumerism gets us in the habit of treating the whole earth in throw-away terms. One writer has called this the “creeping commodification of everything.” Unconsciously, if not by conscious choice, we treat people, as well as material things, as commodities. Everything gets discarded.

Consider how many Americans are in the habit of “shopping around” for churches that might better satisfy their needs, discarding along the way relationships they’ve built up in the congregations they’re leaving behind. Some even shop around for a new spouse, discarding one husband or wife for another.

Seeking still higher profits or to cut their losses, corporate executives sometimes discard thousands of employees, with little apparent regard for the impact of such decisions on local communities or families. Coal companies blast away the tops of whole mountains, with little serious regard for the human communities in the valleys or the plant and animal communities on the mountains.

Throw it all away! Both the things and the people! That’s how the system of commodification of everything works. A way of life that concentrates on getting more things is a way of life that falls apart.

The Church of Jesus Christ, when it’s faithful to the Word of God, offers a counter-cultural alternative. Instead of a throw-away culture, the Church serves as a “redemption center.” Instead of “my way or the highway,” the Church is committed to God’s way as the right way.  The Church puts God first, not things. This is the God who wants to give us life. And this God is the center that will hold, even when things are falling apart.

So, according to the prophet Ezekiel, God says to the wayward souls of Ezekiel’s own time: “get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord GOD. Turn, then, and live” (Ezek 18:31b-32). The Psalmist speaks with the voice of one who has already decided to put God and God’s Word first in his life: “Show me your ways, O Lord, and teach me your paths” (Ps 25:3).

But which God is this, really? Most Americans say they believe in God and things still fall apart.  How is the faith of the Church different? Answer: the God whom the Church celebrates and announces to the world is not the God who blesses the American way of consumerism. This God is invested in a saving culture, not a throw-away culture. Accordingly, when you’re a church-member, you’ve really left the Walmart way behind.

So Paul says to the Philippians: “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others” (Phil 2:5). And how do we do that? Paul answers: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Phil 2:5). Then Paul quotes an early Christian hymn, in order to make it absolutely clear who God is. God is the God who empties God-self (kenosis is the Greek word Paul’s thinking of) for the sake of the whole world in Christ: “he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil 2:8). The God whom the Church celebrates and announces to the world is thus not a “god” of getting, but the God of giving, indeed costly self-giving.

And more. According to the Word of God, this self-giving God has a passion for the poor and the lowly. Jesus was notorious in his time, because of the focus of his ministry:  on prostitutes and tax collectors and widows and others who’d been pushed to the edges of society. So, for example, the Gospel of Matthew quotes Jesus as saying to the leading religious authorities of his time: “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you” (Mt 21:31b).

If you’re looking for Jesus in our world, then, where should you go? Jesus did spend a good deal of time in or near the Temple.  But for the most part, you’d have found him elsewhere, with the down-and-out people of his own day.

So, then, don’t stop at Walmarts. Drive by Nieman Marcus, for sure. Continue on into the city. Pass the elegant high-rise condominiums, where the rich and powerful live. Head over to the back streets. See the homeless wandering around. Visit the shelter for abused women and their children. Walk along the river downtown, whose waters are so polluted that fishing is prohibited (notice, though, that some immigrant families still fish there). Go to church some Sunday in the inner city. That’s where you’re most likely to find the Son of God on any given day in our world.

Some wag once proposed that we should think of the local church as “Consumer’s Anonymous.”  You go there to deal with your addiction to things. You know that things fall apart, but you can’t break the habit, just by working at your addiction on your own.

You go to church because you know you need hear stories about the true God, who stands over against the false god, Mammon: the true God who, according to Ezekiel and the Psalmist, wants you to have life, not death. You go to church to hear stories, as Paul tells them, about how this God has given God-self in Christ, on the Cross, for the sake of the whole world. You go to church to reacquaint yourself with who the Son of God really is: the One whom we know from the Gospels, who came to minister to the outcasts, the godforsaken, and all creatures of no account in this world.

And then, during the week, when you feel the urge to go shopping, because you think that that will make you feel really good, you call up a friend from your church, and he or she comes over to talk you out of your consumerism, once again. After you two have finished talking, you decide together to take some food to the food bank downtown and, on the way back, you make plans to attend a rally in your city to protest American inaction on climate change.

Originally written by Paul Santmire in 2014.

For further theological reflections on consumerism, see John F. Hoffmeyer, “Sacramental Theology in a Consumer Society,” Dialog 53:2 (summer 2014), 127-133.

 

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday September 18-24 in Year A (Santmire)

In Praise of Generosity – Paul Santmire reflects on a kairos moment for Americans.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday September 18-24, Year A (2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

Jonah 3:10 – 4:11
Psalm 145:1-8
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16

In the liberal state of Massachusetts, a woman phoned into a radio talk show to ask that state’s governor a question: “Why do we have to spend our money to take care of somebody else’s children?” She was referring to the governor’s announced intention to provide a temporary, but safe place for some of the thousands of children who had been crossing into the U.S. from Mexico, in order to escape the constant violence of countries like Honduras.

Hers was a representative voice. Many Americans, some card-carrying Christians among them, are likewise distressed by the flood of immigrants crossing into the U.S. from the south.  Thankfully, church leaders of all stripes are standing up to speak in behalf of those children.  Whose voices will carry the day?

This may be a kairos moment for Americans in general and for American Christians in particular.  Kairos is one of the two Greek words for “time.” Kairos means “the right time” or an “urgent time”:  the time for the harvest, for example, or the time for the birth of a baby. In the 1980’s an ecumenical group of Christians in South Africa produced what they called “the Kairos Document,” a biblically based statement calling for the end of apartheid and all its violence. Thanks, in part, to their leadership, the South African people rose to the occasion, with a pervasive and passionate commitment to non-violent resistance. It was the beginning of the ending of the apartheid system.

The exodus of the children from Mexico into the U.S. may well be a kairos moment for our country, likewise, particularly for those who are committed to follow Jesus. All over the earth today, refugees are flooding into neighboring areas, desperately. Think not only of the U.S.-Mexico border, but of places like Syria and Gaza. But those are just today’s headlines.

Forces are also at work around the globe, driven by climate change, that will before too long produce countless millions of “environmental immigrants,” as well, people like those mostly poor families who live in Bangladesh, who will be driven from their ancestral lands by rising ocean waters.

Ours is indeed a kairos moment, not only politically, as in the case of the children’s exodus, but also ecologically, as in the case of threats to the very lives of millions of the poor of the earth in places like Bangladesh. How will Americans, particularly American Christians, respond to this kairos?

We could pout and then go sit in our gated communities or wherever, making sure not to listen to the daily news too much. We could complain the way that caller did to the Governor of Massachusetts. Call that the Jonah strategy. Jonah pouted when God didn’t destroy Nineveh, the way Jonah wanted God to do (Jon 4:1-5). So some Americans pout: Why should we have to pay attention to, not to speak of paying to help, all those political and environmental refugees?

But that’s not the way the God whom we know from the pages of the Bible wants things to be. God cares for all the children of this earth, including those living in alien places like Nineveh. God even cares about the animals of Nineveh! (Jon 4:11). Are we going to pout about the Ninevehs of this world? Maybe even buy a gun or two in order to feel more secure?

St. Paul was faced with this kind of choice. And he was ambivalent about it (Phil 1:22-24). Frankly, he said, he’d rather depart this stressful life and be with Jesus in the kingdom to come, where he could be at home, once and for all, and not have to face up to all the stresses and strains of his ministry:  prison, persecution, ship-wrecks, church members fighting with one another. But, notwithstanding the ambivalence, Paul knew who he was, one who had been called to take up his cross and follow Jesus. (Phil 1:21)

What does “dying with Christ” mean for those of us American Christians who live relatively comfortable, relatively secure and well fed, well cared-for lives? What is our kairos moment saying to us? How will we take to heart the plight of millions of political and environmental refugees today and in the years to come? What sacrifices are we prepared to make? How are we to take up our crosses, in this respect?

Are we ready to sacrifice time and resources so we can rally around our church leaders who are calling our whole society to love and care for the refugees at our borders, particularly the children among them? Are we ready to sacrifice our sometimes anxious sense of security, by welcoming refugees into our own communities and congregations? Are we ready to risk disapproval from our neighbors, by vociferously raising the issues posed by climate change or by passionately speaking out in behalf of those animals suffering the tortures of industrial farming?

But to do that, to be ready even to think about sacrificing ourselves, taking up our crosses, we’ve probably got to deal first with an inner agenda. And that may be the most difficult thing of all.

Many of us have borne the heat and burden of the day. We’ve been working long and hard, like our parents and maybe our grandparents before us (That our grandparents were poor immigrants from Germany or Sweden or Ireland is another matter; Worth thinking about, though). Why should we share our land and our resources and our economy and the fruits of our labors with all these latecomers flooding across our borders? Why should we have to change our way of life so that poor Bangladeshi children won’t be driven from their homes into even deeper poverty and social insecurity by rising waters?

Jesus has another take on these matters.  Those laborers who came to work in the vineyard at the end of the day were paid the same wages as those who had born the heat and burden of the day! (Mt 29:9)  That’s why those who worked all day of course grumbled, (Mt 20:10-11) like the woman talking to the Governor of Massachusetts. But Jesus has a simple answer to such inner discontent on the part of those who’ve worked so hard. God is a generous God! God cares for everybody! So we all are free to do the same!

Are we ready to make that inner change, to take the generosity of God to heart and to go and do likewise?  And to sing along the way, praising the generosity of God?  Singing with the Psalmist:  “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made” (Ps. 145:8f). Isn’t the time—the Kairos—at hand now, for all of us to sing this song, praising the generosity of God, both in word and in deed?

For more information about “the crisis at the border” and advocacy opportunities in behalf of refugees, see the website of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service:  http://lirs.org/bordercrisis/

Originally written by Paul Satmire in 2014.

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday September 18-24 in Year A (Ormseth)

Acceptance in an Economy of Grace – Dennis Ormseth reflects on the parable of the workers in the vineyard.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday September 18-24, Year A (2011, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

Jonah 3:10 – 4:11
Psalm 145:1-8
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16

The readings for this Sunday after Pentecost invite our participation in God’s gracious care for all creation. In the words of the Psalmist, we “celebrate the fame of [God’s] abundant goodness, and shall sing aloud of [God’s] righteousness. The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Ps 145:7-8). An additional verse makes it clear that this love is all-inclusive: “The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made” (Ps 145:9). So we hear that out of concern for the “hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals,” God relents of a threat to punish all Nineveh (Jonah 4:11). And we are encouraged by the Apostle Paul to engage in the “fruitful labor” of a life lived “in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ,” the one whom we know as the Lord, the Servant of all creation. And the Gospel provides more specific encouragement for engaging in this care.

Interpretations of the parable of the “laborers in the vineyard” typically emphasize the landowner’s generosity and “the free gift of grace associated with the kingdom’s coming.” The problem with this reading, suggests Bernard Brandon Scott, is that the supposed target of this teaching, the Pharisees, “would not have seen themselves as rejecting God’s generosity to sinners,” nor is it suggested anywhere that “those who have worked in the vineyard all day have not earned their wages,” which on close analysis turn out to be not generous, but only what an average a peasant could expect to earn (”the usual daily wage,” NRSV) (Hear Then the Parable, pp. 282-83).

What about these workers living on the margins?

The point of the parable lies elsewhere, Scott urges. Matthew reads the parable “as an example of the theme that the first shall be last and of the moral contrast between good and evil” (Ibid., p. 287). He leads his readers into the parable, we note, with a sketch of the end of time (“at the renewal of all things” . . . “and when everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life”) and a portrayal of the great reversal it brings about (“But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first”). The parable also speaks of those who have left home. As Warren Carter notes in his illuminating commentary, day laborers like those invited by the landowner to work in the vineyard,

“. . . were a common sight in the agora, or marketplace (20:3) as they waited to be hired for work. They were a readily available pool of cheap labor for wealthier landowners and urban dwellers. Commonly uprooted from peasant farms taken over by wealthy landowners after foreclosing on debt, or forced from family plots because they could not support the household, they looked for agricultural or urban work, usually day by day and at minimal rates. During planting and harvest, work was readily available, ‘for vintage and haying’ (Varro, On agric 1.17.2), but in between times it often was not. For these ‘expendables’ or involuntary marginals . . . life was unpredictable, marked by unemployment, malnutrition, starvation, disease, minimal wages, removal from households, and begging. Their situation was more precarious than slaves since an employer had no long-term investment in them” (Matthew and the Margins, p.397).

We have seen their modern-day counterparts crowding the entrances to Home Depot parking lots. They are persons for whom the passage of the time of day could easily descend into hunger and a state of despair. Those not hired will end the day without resources to restore themselves for another day of anxious waiting to be hired; they will know themselves as persons without place or means to live. The question that has to be answered in the hearing of this parable is: “What is right?”—because those who are jobless at the day’s end have the same needs as those who are hired early in the morning. And what possibly could the hope for the renewal of all things mean for them?

Determining what is “right” is not so easy.

The narrative of the parable is structured according to the passage of time: from morning, to noon, then through the afternoon and into the evening. The landowner has promised that he will pay each of them “‘whatever is right.” And as each new cohort arrives to work in the vineyard, the question “what is right?” has to resonate more stridently with those who came earlier—and, of course, with the parable’s audience. The surprise at the end of the day is that all are paid the same, what those hired first agreed to, namely, a day’s living wage. Just so, those who came first want to know, what is right about equal pay for very unequal work? And hearers who identify “with the complaint of the first-hired,” opt “for a world in which justice is defined by a hierarchical relation between individuals (i.e., for a world in which the accounting should set matters aright.). To treat all the same is not just, because all are not alike, all have not earned the same.”

The issue is not justice but acceptance

But we have seen earlier what can happen when an accounting is expected to set matters aright. For example, in the parable of the king’s accounting we read last Sunday, an expectation of different treatment on the part of the servant elicited a demand from his fellow servants for an equally harsh punishment! It appears that it is indeed more difficult to say “what is right” than one at first thinks. But is it really a fair resolution that the landowner claims for himself: “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”

Again the ground has shifted under the feet of the audience: there will be no resolution to the question “what is right.” As Scott explains, “The lack in the parable of any absolute standard of justice undermines any human standard for the kingdom.” What then is the standard? For the parable, value or worth (i.e., a place in the kingdom), Scott argues, is determined not by what is right but by acceptance. The householder’s urgent though unexplained need for laborers is the parable’s metaphor for grace. It is not wages or hierarchy that counts but the call to go into the vineyard. The householder’s generosity lies not in the wage but in the need (Scott, p. 297). And because nothing is said about it being either planting or harvest time, the need is not so much the landowner’s own need, but rather that of the laborers themselves. Those who hear the parable as a story of injustice (“These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat”) are sent away from the vineyard; they do not belong here with “the last.”

The vineyard is God’s vineyard—the world!

How then is this parable concerned with care of creation? Early, midday, afternoon, evening, the landowner persists through the cycle of the day. The workers are called, Scott notes, to service at “not simply any farm work but labor in a vineyard,” which has the strong metaphorical potential of the Song of the Vineyard (Is 5:1-7) and Jeremiah 12:10, the vineyard which “many shepherds have destroyed.” It is a richly significant place. And who is the householder? In Matthew’s casting, it is Jesus (Scott, p. 287). In our reading, it is Jesus as the Lord, the Servant of Creation. And he calls these persons at the margins to participate in the “alternative economy of unlimited grace” which we envisioned in our comment on last Sunday’s readings, in which the gift of creation always creates the value to be enjoyed by those who participate in it. Here, too, is that “alternative economy” in which an “alternative egalitarian lifestyle” with its equal opportunity for meaningful work is regarded as the “right” thing, the good, Godlike thing, to do (Carter, p. 398). The workers were without place to work; but by the end of the day each of them has been restored to work in the creation and invited to enter into the joy of that “good thing.”

Can we offer work that is meaningful for people and that restores creation?

Among the strategies for developing a “culture of creation” (identified by Norman Wirzba in his Paradise of God) is the renewal of the meaning of work in relationship to the creation. Work that is severed from the rhythms of creation in places that are not familiar to us has an anonymous character, he suggests,

“that makes it impossible for workers to see practically how what they are doing might benefit or harm others, and vice versa. What we do, our productivity, serves a neighborhood that is unfamiliar to us, and so the affection and care that are the hallmarks of quality work, as well as the inspiration for a fulfilling and enjoyable work experience, are untapped. In a global economy, for the most part, we do not see the effects of what we do because they take place, oftentimes, thousands of miles away. Compensation serves as the substitute for the felt kindness and experienced blessing that otherwise would come from the close, affirming interaction among friends. . . More fundamental to work than its compensatory or its obligatory aspects is its ability to express gratitude and respect for innumerable benefits received. . . .Put positively, authentic or proper work and leisure reflect an attitude of attention to the orders and the needs of creation and a disposition to care for and preserve the rhythms and flow of life” (Wirzba, pp. 153-54).

The workers hired at the beginning of the day protested the seeming injustice of the landowner; they obviously thought mainly of their value in terms of the compensation they should earn, it seems. Those called later had the opportunity to learn about mercy, respect and gratitude from one who wanted to be not just an employer, but also one who would be a friend.

Can we root our work in the grace of creation?

Can members of a congregation learn to think differently about their work, and perhaps even to experience it differently? Possibly, if they can see themselves as people who have at least in spirit “left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields,” for Jesus’ name’s sake. As Wirzba suggests, drawing on the mystical insight of Meister Eckhart, in “returning to our ‘ground ‘. . . we come upon the experience of the grace of creation and there find our proper bearings for action. We learn that work is not foremost about us, but is instead the holy activity through which creation as a whole is sanctified. Work, rather than following from divine punishment, becomes the noble activity of presenting to God a creation strengthened and restored through the exercise of our hands, heart and head. It is to join with God in the divine work of cultivating and maintaining a garden (Gen 2:8-9).  It is to enter into the flow of the divine beneficence and hospitality.” For those who came last to the vineyard, all this opens up as possibility for them—for them, and for those who hear, whenever the invitation of Jesus to work in God’s vineyard is presented.

Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2011.
dennisormseth@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday September 11-17 in Year A (Ormseth)

A Reconfigured Parable – Dennis Ormseth reflects on a parable’s proposal of the unlimited economy of grace.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday September 11-17, Year A (2011, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

Genesis 50:15-21
Psalm 103:[1-7]8-13
Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35

With a compelling primary theme of forgiveness, the readings for this Sunday after Pentecost seemingly offer little of direct relevance to our concern with care of creation. To be sure, the attention given to the church community’s ethos in the Gospel and the second lesson can prove salutary for any effort that requires corporate discipline and generosity of spirit. The emphasis on forgiveness might be particularly helpful, specifically, in strengthening the interpersonal relationships of a congregation that seeks to model the kind of face-to-face web of neighborhood relationships we proposed in our comment on last Sunday’s readings.

Can forgiveness be extended to the relationship between congregation and neighborhood?

F. LeRon Shults and Steven J. Sandage illustrate the point nicely in The Faces of Forgiveness:  Searching for Wholeness and Salvation. They interpret Matthew 18:23-35 in terms of a “facial hermeneutics of intersubjectivity” that reveals a community “struggling with problems of power in their way of ordering their life together and needed instruction and exhortation on manifesting grace toward each other.” The offending slave of the parable, they suggest, shows no “positive movement toward forgiveness in the sense of therapeutic transformation.” The horizon of his understanding needs to be extended “both temporally and spatially so that he could imaginatively envision his own place in the broader human community” (Shults and Sandage, pp.237-39). Any such extension of understanding within the community, we can hope, would contribute to a healthier dynamic in the relationship between a congregation and its neighborhood.

See how God’s goodness has cosmic dimensions!

Encouragement for going beyond this modest result to reflect further on these texts in search of specific direction for care of creation might nonetheless be inferred from reading the Psalm appointed for the day. Giving thanks for God’s goodness (“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits—who forgives all your iniquity”), the psalmist measures God’s “steadfast love” with cosmic dimensions: “For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our transgressions from us” (103:11-12). The psalmist speaks of the Creator’s love: “For he knows how we were made; he remembers that we are dust” (103:14, not included in the appointed verses). Is there, possibly, a cosmic significance, then, to the practice of forgiveness?

Could this tyrant reflect God’s image?

Furthermore, the parable with which Jesus exhorts the undoubtedly astonished Peter to unlimited acts of forgiveness is focused rather less clearly on interpersonal relationships than Shults and Sandage tend to view it. Rather, the frames of reference are the economic, social, and political relationships characteristic of imperial rule. As Warren Carter observes,

“The king and his reign are usually understood as images of God and God’s empire (18:35). But the gospel has established that God’s empire manifested in Jesus is generally not like the death-bringing and oppressive reign of Rome and typical kings (17:25; 20:25). Yet the parable evokes precisely this scenario! The king is a tyrant who, like Rome (see 18:24), collects excessive tribute, and in the end inflicts vicious torture on a servant” (Carter, Matthew and the Margins:  A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, pp. 370-71).

Thus, the scope within which the act of forgiveness is being considered has been expanded to encompass “affairs of state,” in the phrase of Bernard Brandon Scott.

And there is even more. There is a striking contradiction in this parable’s presentation by Matthew: It evokes for the reader that “the familiar image of God as king, but the imperial scenario of exploitative and oppressive reign . . . indicates that this figure cannot be God. The audience can discern that God’s empire is not like this, is not oppressive, does not deal in self-serving ‘mercy’. . , does not forgive just once only to revoke it.” Nevertheless, to the reader’s great surprise, at the conclusion of the parable, Jesus insists that his “heavenly Father” will do exactly what this king does to his servant. The frame of the parable has been enlarged to embrace the huge and even monstrous question of the relationship of God to the great conflicts of human history.

Is this not unjust fiscal policy?

Interpreters struggle to thread their way though the thicket of this text. Scott is helpful in providing a reading that does not require strict narrative consistency to reach its result. “A chaotic situation entraps the audience,” he notes:

“The king’s brutal action forces a hearer to reconsider the consistency building that has held the story together. By identifying with the fellow servants in reporting the servant, a hearer bears with them responsibility for unleashing the king’s wrath. By bringing vengeance on the servant, the fellow servants (and the hearer) have left their own situation in jeopardy.  The demand for ‘like for like,’ for apparent justice, has left them exposed. If a king can take back his forgiveness, who is safe?” (Scott, Hear Then the Parable, A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus, pp.  278).

“Who, indeed?” we might ask in our times of massive public indebtedness generated by the policies and behavior of a global financial elite. While the fellow servants might have avoided the moral hazard of “bailing out” the king’s lead tax farmer, in the phrase of our day, they have lent legitimacy to the crushing disintegration of the economic order that they themselves depend on for their well being. All of them have become inescapably more vulnerable to the harsh policy of the king who will destroy the servant’s business, his family, and his position of power within the community, in the name of accountability.

But the disturbance goes even deeper, Scott observes. The fellow servants’ reporting is like the first servant’s own activity. In the end, the fellow servants have behaved the same way he did, namely, they failed to forgive and they demanded punishment. And so the audience is drawn ineluctably “into a threatening world whose boundaries and guidelines begin to dissolve,” and the hearers are “swept into a vortex for chaos” in which they fail as the servant fails: they, too, “have failed to forgive.” The narrative thus leads its audience to a “parabolic experience of evil, not intentional evil but implicit, unanticipated, systemic evil . . . where the only option left is repentance” (Ibid., p. 279-80).

How might the scenario of this parable have gone differently?

The audience’s conundrum serves to raise the question, beyond the telling of the parable, regarding how things might have gone differently? How might this terrifying result of the king’s need for accountability be avoided? Is it really conceivable that the king might have forgiven his debtor not just once, but a second and third time, or even “seven times seven times,” as Jesus set the standard for Peter? In a less troubled but real world, of course, the situation could have been avoided entirely if the debtor paid his debt, with appropriate interest. Or being unable to do that, on account of whatever combination of factors, perhaps he might have succeeded in winning the king’s assent to a plan that would have allowed him to continue service of his co-servants debt, with which he might, over time, pay what he owes. Contemporary readers of Matthew’s Gospel will recognize a set of problems that confront us daily in a time of extended financial crisis.

Such leniency on the part of king and servant alike would have the advantage, it might be argued, of allowing the others to share in the good king’s generosity. It seems that the servant’s better course might have been not only to encourage his master in this creative course of action, but to demonstrate its value and power by first taking the initiative himself, even risking his own wealth, in order to show the others that such a generous spirit works to the well-being of all. Couldn’t the king then indeed be the good king of God’s empire, on whom one could rely for a properly positive analogy for an infinitely forgiving God? Indeed, might one not quite appropriately imagine that the king of the parable is truly Jesus’ heavenly father, the creator of all things?

How can we give account of our care for the Earth?

If that were taken to be the case, then the servant who was called to give account is clearly the human being tasked with responsible care of the creation, and we have a parable very much concerned with care of creation. Ideally, the servant could report that his care has indeed enhanced the creation, so responsible has he been in exercising his responsibility. But failing that, again for whatever reason, would it not be appropriate for him, relying on his king’s generous mercy, to set forth in a great venture to restore what has been lost, drawing along with him in this great project of restoration of all those who are in turn accountable to him, so that they could know and rejoice with the king that not only his original gift was being honored, but that with each successive allowance of space and time to further amend their destructive ways, the glory of that creation might be enhanced far beyond its original state, now understood to have been good enough for starters, but hardly perfect?

We can be participants in a web of creation that is re-given in every moment of its journey through time by an infinitely loving God.

The reader will hopefully understand and appreciate what this new spinning of the parable is meant to accomplish: as an alternative to the “parabolic experience of evil” set out above, we propose a “parabolic experience of good,” as it were—indeed, an intentional, explicit, anticipated, and whole reality of created goodness, in which both king and servants participate with great joy!  This, we would suggest, is what becomes possible when Jesus is seen to be truly the servant of creation, who does the will of his heavenly father, the creator of all things. God is indeed infinitely gracious in giving the creation for the benefit of humanity, but only as participants in the whole web of creation that is re-given in every moment of its journey through time. Precisely in responding to this infinite love of the creation by properly caring for the creation his father loves, the servant of creation works out the role that the unforgiving servant refused. Now that he has been introduced in the shadow of his antithesis, this true servant will appear in other parables of Jesus’ telling in Matthew, such as “the Faithful and Wise Servant” (Mt 24:45-51), “A Man Entrusts Property” (Mt 21:33-46), and “A Householder Went Out Early” (Mt 20:1-15), and, of course, in many parables in the other Gospels.

The new parable proposes an alternative economy of unlimited grace.

The parable proposes an alternative economy of unlimited grace as a clue to understanding what forgiveness is about, and why it must be unlimited. Our resetting of the parable proposes a narrative of the relationship between the human servant of God and God’s creation that envisions its restoration as a possible outcome of a radically forgiving spirit. Support for this re-setting can be found in two provocatively different essays. Thomas Friedman has argued in his Hot, Flat, and Crowded (Release 2.0 Edition), that the 2008 financial crisis and the environmental crisis are derived from one cause. As he puts it, the Great Recession that began in 2008 was a “warning heart attack” that we ignore at our great peril:

“. . . while they might not appear on the surface to have been related, the destabilization of both the Market and Mother Nature had the same root causes. That is why Bear Stearns and the polar bears both faced extinction at the same time. That is why Citibank, Iceland’s banks, and the ice banks of Antarctica all melted down at the same time. The same recklessness undermined all of them. I am talking about a broad breakdown in individual and institutional responsibility by key actors in both the natural world and the financial world—on top of a broad descent into dishonest accounting, which allowed individuals, banks, and investment firms to systematically conceal or underprice risks, privatize gains, and socialize losses without the general public grasping what was going on” (Friedman, pp.6-7).

This insight is strong reason to attend, as this reading does, to the origins of the practice of forgiveness of sin in the practice of forgiveness of debt, as the phrase “forgive us our debts” in what used to be the standard version of the Lord’s Prayer serves to remind us. Its implications for the current “affairs of state,” not just its psychology of the failure to forgive as Jesus would have us forgive, are clear.

Our current financial crisis is a crisis also of the environment

If the financial crisis is also a crisis of the environment, are they not together also a crisis of the creation? If our reading finds surprising resonance with such current “affairs of state,” however, it also remains faithful to the theological concern for forgiveness as a relationship between God and humankind. In his discussion of the doctrine of salvation in The Beauty of the Infinite, David Bentley Hart observes that Christian theology effects a conversion “of the story of wrath into the story of mercy,” replacing “the myth of sacrifice as economy with the narrative of sacrifice as a ceaseless outpouring of gift and restoration in an infinite motion exceeding every economy.” Without developing his argument in full, we see its relevance to our reading in the following comment:

“The sacrifice that Christian theology upholds is inseparable from the gift: it underwrites not the stabilizing regime of prudential violence, but the destabilizing extravagance of giving and giving again, of declaring love and delight in the exchange of songs of peace, outside of every calculation of debt or power. The gift of the covenant—which in a sense implores Israel to respond—belongs to the Trinity’s eternal “discourse” of love, which eternally “invites” and offers regard and recognition; it precedes and exceeds, then, every economy of power, because all “credit” is already given and exhausted, because the love it declares and invokes is prior to, and the premise of, all that is given” (Hart, pp. 350).

Jesus the Lord, the Servant of Creation, restores the Creator’s gift and offers it anew for our responsible care as an act of forgiveness;

God’s balances, he concludes, “are not righted by an act of immolation, the debt is not discharged by the destruction of the victim and his transformation into credit; rather, God simply continues to give, freely, inexhaustible, regardless of rejection. God gives and forgives; he fore-gives and gives again” (Ibid., p. 351). Just so, Jesus the Lord, the Servant of Creation, restores the Creator’s gift and offers it anew for our responsible care as an act of forgiveness; those who join in care of creation share in that act, as often as it takes place.

Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2011.
dennisormseth@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday September 4-10 in Year A (Ormseth)

Love Your Neighbor! – Dennis Ormseth reflects on cultivating a sense of place, where love for one another includes all of life.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday September 4-10, Year A (2011, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

Ezekiel 33:7-11
Psalm 119:33-40
Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 18:15-20

With the texts for this Sunday after Pentecost, we continue from the previous two Sundays a search for principles to guide the church’s care for creation. Our requirement is that the principles be consonant with Jesus’ role as Servant of Creation and also conform to the general expectations he set out for his followers. The reading from Matthew reiterates the encouragement from the Gospel reading two Sunday’s ago for engaging in this search: “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  As we stated in our comment on that text, we understand this promise to encourage the church in the pursuit of understanding what works for the “care, preservation, and restoration of the Earth,” in view of the global ecological crisis of our times.

The Gospel for this Sunday is clearly focused on interpersonal conflict within the community of faith. The practices proposed here for resolving conflict within the community, while not specifically relevant to care of creation, are nonetheless good counsel for those advancing the cause of creation care within congregations. They envision a close, but not a closed, community that holds its members accountable for the ethical consequences of their beliefs. By careful comparison, Warren Carter shows that while these guidelines are similar to those developed in other religious communities of the period, they clearly incline more toward reconciliation than strict exclusion. Even those who have resisted both private and public admonishment are still to be regarded as “Gentiles and tax collectors,” which would make them “objects of mission, people to be won over to the community of disciples . . . . What is ratified is not the offender’s permanent exclusion.” Like God (Mt 18:10-14), the community pursues the difficult task of restoration.” (Carter, Matthew and the Margins:  A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading pp. 367-68).

This is wise counsel for environmentalists operating within the church; adamant, self-righteous insistence on environmentally benign practices can quickly alienate offenders beyond the point of recruitment to the cause. Patience in developing an appropriate understanding of the issues at stake is by far the more successful strategy. The “two or three” gathered in the name of Jesus do well to keep the purpose of the healing and restoration of creation ahead of being “right”—it should suffice that they have the promise of the Servant of Creation to be with them.

Love for Neighbor and Self Cannot Ignore Love of the Nature that Undergirds Us.

While the counsel regarding love of neighbor from the second reading in Romans 13 would seem to be similarly limited to the arena of social relationships, it is in fact highly relevant to our concern with care of creation. We noted in our comment on the lesson from Romans for last Sunday that, in the view of David Horrell, Cherryl Hunt and Christopher Southgate in their recent book on Greening Paul, the Apostle Paul’s ethical reflections generally constitute “an ethic of universal human concern” that “offers the potential to undergird some forms of ecological reflection,” although remaining “a theological ethic that is essentially anthropocentric.” Paul’s summation of the law under the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” in today’s first lesson demonstrates their point exactly. Paul’s choice of commandments fits well within this limitation of concern to human relationships; and the suggestion that such love is appropriately measured by one’s love of self would appear to ignore Jesus’ encouragement to “deny self and take up one’s cross,” which we encountered in last Sunday’s Gospel. On the other hand, when read in the context of faith in Jesus as the Lord, the Servant of Creation, this command to “love one’s neighbor as oneself” proves to be profoundly salutary for care of creation as practiced by his church.

Caring for the sheep means tending to the pasture. Loving the neighbor means caring for our shared place in creation.

Can one imagine that one could love a neighbor, doing the neighbor no wrong, as Paul specifies, without also caring for the “ ‘hood” in which the neighbor lives? The problem of Paul’s “anthropocentricism,” in this instance at least, may be more a matter of our tendency to read “neighbors” simply as individuals who either have needs to be met or, as in a common interpretation of Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan, the means and will to meet those needs. But was the man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho to be loved even though, or precisely because, he was not at home with his own neighbors, in the sense of those who live close by (cf. Luke 10:25-37). Might not Jesus have meant to assert the importance of that very natural web of relationships we call a neighborhood across a wider span of reference? As we have noted before, a good shepherd takes care not only for the sheep of his flock but also for the pasture where his sheep feed. In a sense, what the Good Samaritan did for the man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was to create a neighborhood that would provide for his very desperate and immediate need.

Love your neighbor! Love your neighborhood!

Furthermore, the idea of taking one’s self-love as the measure of one’s love of neighbor is removed in the instance of the actual neighbor, since the actual neighbor is by definition one who shares that ‘hood’ with one’s self. The practice of love for the neighbor’s neighborhood necessarily entails love for one’s own neighborhood. Since they are the same place, what one does for the ‘hood’ to the benefit of the neighbor necessarily also benefits oneself within that same web of relationships.

Cultivate a sense of your place.

Care for the neighborhood as an essential aspect of love of neighbor encompasses all aspects of that web, natural no less than social, economic and political. However, the importance of care of the neighborhood, understood as a geographically-limited region, derives also from the fact that it involves a network of personal relationships that, as we have seen above with reference to the Gospel reading, should be present and operative within the life of a congregation. Such relationships are characteristically face-to-face, whether that interface is between humans or between humans and the non-human creation.  They make possible a quality of concern and care all too rare in the normally less personal relationships of modern society. As Norman Wirzba observes,

“The significance of proximity, of face-to-face familiarity, should not be underestimated as we try to recover a sense of responsibility for creation. In large part it is because the moral sense depends on it. Is it an accident that the eclipse of the moral sense of the world goes hand in hand with the practical and the theoretical distance between humanity and the earth that is fully developed in the modern world? So long as we treat others, whether they be human or nonhuman others, in an abstract manner as objects or workers or consumers, we invariable tend to degrade them, to misunderstand and misuse them. We overlook their intrinsic value or at best assign to them a value derived from our economic or utilitarian calculus” (Wirzba, The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age, p. 170).

While Wirzba makes this point relative to the growth of economic and social organizations in modern society, we would raise it as an especially important concern for congregations seeking to consistently demonstrate care of creation. In the church, as elsewhere, responsible action requires “that we become knowledgeable about the contexts in which our action takes place.” This happens only as we “forsake our passive ways and become attentive to the world around us” (Ibid., pp. 165-66.)

Measure your ecological imprint on the place you inhabit.

The drive for what usually counts for success on the part of contemporary congregational organizations involves growth that quickly transcends capacity for awareness of the congregation’s ecological footprint. Corporate efficiency “demands uniformity and generalization,” Wirzba notes. This is true also for churches: policy is too often guided by principles of growth that foster disregard, not only for differences between persons, but also for the great variety of life in the ecological setting of the congregation. “There simply isn’t the time to pay attention to, nor is there someone who can master all the specifics of, the needs of particular places. What this simplification amounts to is a distortion of the reality engaged” (Ibid., p. 167). Who takes note if that huge expanse of asphalt deemed necessary to attract young suburban families represents an assault on water quality and animal habitat? Who counts the cost to the health, so that people might come, ironically, to worship God the Creator and proclaim Jesus the Servant of Creation, Lord?

When love of neighbor is taken to include love of the neighbor’s neighborhood, the congregation will necessarily develop concern for the health of the larger community’s ecological situation. Care for the congregation’s neighborhood will indeed be a primary concern for a congregation that cares for creation.

Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2011.
dennisormseth@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday August 28 – September 3 in Year A (Ormseth)

Following Jesus as Servant of Creation – Dennis Ormseth reflects on self-centered reasons and altruism.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday August 28 – September 3, Year A (2011, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

Jeremiah 15:15-21
Psalm 26:1-8
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28

In our comment on the lections for last Sunday, we presented an argument for the appropriateness of our identification of Jesus as “the Lord, the Servant of Creation.” Authorization for this new title, we suggested, grows out of Jesus’ promise that he would build his church on the basis of Peter’ confession and that it’s use constitutes a proper use of the powers vested in the church “to bind and loose” such matters as arise in the manifestation of God’s empire. The argument we have presented provides strong encouragement for the work of caring for creation on the part of the church, we believe, with the caution that this Sunday’s Gospel needs to be taken into consideration as one engages in such care.

What might “taking up one’s cross and following Jesus” mean for the care of creation?

Our concern is this: when ecological awareness and political action on environmental issues become part of the ethos of the Christian church, they should be governed by principles that Jesus laid down for his followers for their ministry. It follows, with respect to the Gospel reading, that just as Peter’s confidence in his confession of Jesus as Messiah is challenged in this Sunday’s Gospel by Jesus’ announcement that he “must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised,” so also does the authorization of care of creation entail an expectation that those who draw on Jesus for support and guidance for their care of creation will conform to the counsel set forth in his response to Peter’s rebuke:

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.  For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?” Or what will they give in return for their life? (Mt 16:24-26).

What, then, might “taking up one’s cross and following Jesus” mean for the care of creation?

“Jesus does for the creation what God knows the creation needs, not what Jesus as a human being might find more desirable and ‘wise.’”

Our answer will of course be shaped by what we understand it to have meant for Jesus to take up his cross. Warren Carter explains the necessity of Jesus’ suffering in terms of two broad themes.  First, there is the political imperative: “He must suffer in Jerusalem because the center is always threatened by the margins and the empire strikes back at those who expose its injustice and who promote an alternative empire. His suffering is the inevitable consequence of this collision course with the political, socioeconomic, and religious elite” (Carter, Matthew and the Margins:  A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, p. 341). To care for creation as Jesus cares for it, accordingly, carries an expectation of coming into conflict with the economic and political structures of our society, with an awareness that this conflict will be costly to one’s status and power in relationship to the community where one lives. As we suggested in our comment on the readings for Passion Sunday, Jesus, who serves God by faithfully serving creation, suffers precisely on account of that service. “Jesus does for the creation what God knows the creation needs, not what Jesus as a human being might find more desirable and ‘wise.’” In Jesus’ words from the Gospel, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” For, to follow Jesus, as Carter puts it, “is to renounce the practice of telling God and God’s agent how God’s purposes are best accomplished. It is to refuse to place oneself ahead of, or in the place of, the revealer.” It was in holding to this rule that Jesus came into conflict with the religious and political authorities. And so will we.

Will we face the cost?

At the same time, it is precisely this “cost” that can be expected to generate the spiritual power and churchly social capital needed to stand in steadfast opposition to the community’s disregard for creation, and the courage to await vindication. Coinciding with this first necessity is a second, more explicitly theological one:  his suffering is “also inevitable because through Jesus’ suffering and death, God will expose the limits of the elite’s power to punish and control. God will raise him to show that while the political and religious elite trade in death, God’s sovereignty asserts life over death. They do not have the last word” (Ibid.).

The appeal to care for creation is here grounded in a radically altruistic regard for others, irrespective of the consequences for one’s self.

The difference of approach here, in comparison with standard appeals for action on environmental issues, is clear. The latter generally appeal to rationally calculated and/or emotionally awakened self-interest. Utilization of new technologies, it is urged, save a congregation money as well as reduce pollution; or, it is said, we must act so that our grandchildren can enjoy the same quality of life we enjoy, or better. Such appeals have their place, to be sure. But the appeal here is instead grounded in a radically altruistic regard for others, irrespective of consequences for one’s self. Again, in Jesus’ words, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?”

Or, as Carter puts it, “Jesus’ scandalous call . . . is a call to martyrdom, to die as Jesus does . . . . Such is the risk of continuing Jesus’ countercultural work of proclaiming and demonstrating God’s empire (Mt 10:7-8).” Because the calculation involved here is a matter of life and death, both one’s own and others, the action provides the occasion for the manifestation of the living God’s creative sovereignty over life and death; only so can one actually hope for defeat of the demonic powers operative in the oppressive systems of the social and political order, which—because they are deeply rooted in self-concern and presuppose the existence of the self in unbroken continuity and undiminished power—cannot otherwise be overcome.

Paul challenges us to oppose evil with goodness.

The second lesson, Romans 12:9-21, provides an illuminating comparison of different ways of developing an ethic of care for creation. The ethical counsels offered by Paul also express a degree of altruistic regard for the other, informed as they are by the quest “to discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” offered in 12:2 as the basic principle of Christian life. Carol Dempsey appropriately characterizes the two main themes of the counsels as follows:

” . . . first, the ways that Christians are to manifest genuine love (vv. 10-13), and second, the obligations that one has towards one’s enemies (vv. 14-20). The final verse summarizes Paul’s comments: Christians are not to succumb to evil and evil’s ways but are to deal with evil according to the ways of goodness” (Dempsey, “Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost/ Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time,” in New Proclamation Year A, 2002, p. 188).

However, notably missing from the counsels in this passage is the eschatological life and death thrust of Jesus’ teaching. David Horrell, Cherryl Hunt, and Christopher Southgate make the argument that while Paul’s ethical teaching represents (in this and other passages such as Romans 12:14-17; Galatians 6:10; Philippians 4:5; 1 Thessalonians 3:12, 5:15):

“an ethic of universal human concern that offers the potential to undergird some forms of ecological reflection, since the injunction to love or do good to all (human) neighbors can promote action to mitigate the effects of environmental degradation or change where this influences human health or welfare, for example, in flooding exacerbated by global warming. But this remains a theological ethic that is essentially anthropocentric” (Horrell, Hunt, and Southgate, Greening Paul: Rereading the Apostle in a Time of Ecological Crisis, pp. 195-95.)

Paul encompasses the whole creation in the story of redemption!

These authors propose to go beyond this exclusively anthropocentric concern by reading such passages in the light of Romans 8:19-23 and Colossians 1:15-20, where Paul more “clearly encompasses the whole creation” in his story of redemption. More helpful, as we look to developing a message for Christians gathered in worship, we suggest, is to read it in the light of today’s Gospel. This scripture supplies the missing kenotic and eschatological dimensions of the narrative of Jesus’ life that provide for the inclusion of the whole of creation as a proper object of Christian ethical concern.

Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2011.
dennisormseth@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday August 21-27 in Year A (Ormseth)

The Best Title for Jesus?  He is the Lord and Servant of Creation! – Dennis Ormseth reflects on who the Gospel of Matthew tells us Jesus is.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday August 21-27, Year A (2011, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

Isaiah 51:1-6
Psalm 138
Romans 12:1-8
Matthew 16:13-20

Who do you say I am? The Lord and Servant of Creation.

“But who do you say that I am?” asks Jesus of his disciples in the Gospel for this Sunday after Pentecost. “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” his disciple Simon Peter answers. Our own response to Jesus’ question, based on the readings we have given to the lections thus far in Year A, is this: “Jesus is the Lord, the Servant of creation.” We have argued for the validity of this new title for Jesus through a now rather extended commentary on those lections. In our comment on the readings for The Holy Trinity we summarized our reflections towards that conclusion, and we would refer our readers to that comment for the substance of our argument.

Peter’s answer raises the question of the validity of our answer anew, however. Because the title of “Messiah” tends to evoke for the Christian reader a rather high Christology, our answer may seem to have less than a clear claim to be revealed by Jesus’ “Father in heaven.” It is, perhaps, more like those answers the disciples reported “people” were giving, answers derived no doubt from “flesh and blood,” which Warren Carter suggests, “denotes the human situation before God, . . . as the inability to know God and God’s ways. It underlines the limitations of ‘human intellectual, religious and mystical capacities’ before God” (Carter, Matthew and the Margins:  A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, p. 56).

 We acknowledge such limitations! It can be noted, however, that contrary to conventional views, there was in fact “no standard expectation of a messiah, nor did every Jew look for a special anointed figure.” Use of the term, Carter insists, rather “raises a question. For what special task or role has God anointed or designated Jesus?” An answer is given early in the Gospel: “He will save his people from their sins” (Mt 1:21). But it takes the entire gospel to develop fully what this disarmingly simple answer actually entails. The account of Peter’s confession can accordingly be seen as a “summary scene” that “restates the central issue” as it relates to the narrative of Jesus’ story at the end of the third block of Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 11:2-16:20): “Have people been able to discern from Jesus’ ministry that he is God’s Christ, the one anointed to manifest God’s salvation and empire (cf. Mt 11:2-6)” (Ibid., p. 332).

It seems clear that while “the people” do not see in Jesus “the Christ,” the disciples do. On the other hand, it is not clear that the disciples know what the actual role of this Messiah is. At the conclusion of his commentary on this section of Matthew, Carter cautions that “as the unfolding narrative will show, the disciples do not yet fully understand what Jesus is commissioned to do” (Ibid., p. 337). Carter has reference, of course, to Jesus’ announcement that “he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised (Mt 16:21), part of the Gospel reading for next Sunday. But without anticipating what that will mean for our answer, how can we presume to know more than the disciples do at this point? How legitimate is it for us to make the claim we do? What really could we know about what it means to “manifest God’s salvation and empire,” in Carter’s phrase?

What is Jesus’ mission? To be shepherd to Israel.

For Carter, an answer to this question begins to emerge from careful analysis of the context of Jesus’ mission. The setting of this Sunday’s gospel narrative, we are immediately informed in v. 13, is “the district of Caesarea Philippi.” Carter comments on this information as follows: “The scene is set . . . some twenty miles north of the Sea of Galilee south of Mt. Hermon.  G. W. Nickelsburg notes it as a place of revelation and commission. . . , important elements of this scene. The site had been a shrine for the god Pan, god of flocks and shepherds (Josephus, Ant 15.363-64).” In Carter’s view, this information should remind us that Matthew has already told us that Jesus is also to be known as a shepherd of his people.

The one who shepherds/governs my people Israel (see Mt 2:6), who has compassion for the crowds as sheep without a shepherd (Mt 9:36; Ezek 34), who is sent to the lost sheep of Israel (Mt 15:24), and who sends his disciples on a similar mission (Mt 10:6), the son of the shepherd David who manifests God’s reign among the marginal (Mt 9:27; 12:23; 15:22) is again recognized as God’s commissioned agent (Carter, p.332).

In this perspective, therefore, Jesus would be an alternative shepherd for the people. Thus is introduced a metaphor for the interpretation of Jesus’ role that we have seen to have considerable significance for our understanding of him within the community of his followers as “The Lord, the Servant of creation.” If Jesus is “the Messiah;” he is also “the good shepherd.”  Do the “people” see this? No, and neither, strictly speaking, do the disciples. This is not necessarily what the title “Messiah” would have meant to them. But for the reader of the Gospel of Matthew who knows the territory and its culture, Jesus’ presence there nonetheless sets up the possibility for “discovery” of this meaning.

As shepherd to his people, Jesus restores people and land!

This proposal regarding Jesus as shepherd gives rise to further difficulty for our answer to Jesus’ question, however. In our comment on the lections for Good Shepherd Sunday, we suggested “the complex of relations brought to mind by [Jesus’] metaphor [of the shepherd] is incomplete without the lived-in context of the creation that shepherd and sheep share. A people or a community, centered on and founded by Jesus, the servant of creation, will flourish in the context of a creation that, especially in view of the resurrection, is being restored.”  The first reading assigned for this Sunday actually amplifies this expectation: “For the Lord will comfort Zion,” the prophet writes; “he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song” (Isa 51:3). As the Servant of God, Jesus would do what God would do; God, this lesson insists, restores not only the people but also the land to which they are returned. And the Messiah, the commissioned agent of God, will work to effect this restoration.  God’s salvation includes the restoration, we might say, of the shepherd’s pasture.

But is such restoration a real possibility within the territory that Jesus now enters? How can it happen, in view of the fact that there is also another claimant to lordship over this very same territory? And this is something that both the people and the disciples had to know, since it obviously was a matter of ‘flesh and blood.” The location of Caesarea Philippi, Carter notes, “also underlines the issue of sovereignty.” The name of the city reflects its involvement with imperial power. King Herod built a marble temple there in honor of Augustus . . . Philip enlarged the city and named it Caesarea . . . Agrippa enlarged it further and renamed it Neronias in honor of the emperor Nero . . . After Jerusalem fell (70 C.E.), Titus visited the city, and “many” Jewish captives were thrown to wild beasts or forced to fight each other. . . Its names, buildings (typically using local wealth [taxes and levies], labor, and materials), activities, and history attest Rome’s claims and power (Carter, p. 332).

Even in land “ruled” by the Roman Empire, the shepherd comes to restore the land.

Is it not then quite astonishing that it is in precisely this place that a disciple of Jesus first names him “Messiah”? On the contrary, as it is precisely in the face of this difficulty that, as Carter observes, God’s purposes for Jesus and his followers are affirmed, purposes which contest Rome’s claims that Jupiter determines human affairs, that history is under Rome’s control, and that the emperor is the channel for the god’s blessing and presence . . . Jesus, not Rome, is the agent of God’s purposes, which will ultimately be triumphant (Ibid.)

The pasture over which this shepherd watches, to follow through the implications of our metaphor, is the very territory that the Roman army has violated and laid waste in its imperial conquest. Even into such a place the one who is Christ comes to restore the creation.

But again, how could it ever actually be accomplished? The confession made by Peter does actually suggest how this will happen, perhaps beyond his own understanding. Jesus is, after all, the Messiah, the agent of God. And more precisely, he is “the Son of the living God.” This is perhaps the more decisive claim, in our view, as it begins to fill out the role of the Messiah by suggesting the source and purposes of his work. Carter helpfully explains the meaning of this second part of Peter’s confession:

As the living God, or God of life (Deut 5:26; Josh 3:10; 1 Sam 17:26, 36, @ Kgs 19:4, 16; Pss 42:2; 84:2; Hos 1:10; Dan 6:20), God is creative, active, faithful, and just.  As God’s son/child or agent, Jesus expresses this life in his words and healings, feedings, exorcisms, and so on (cf. 11:2-6), and in creating a community that participates in God’s empire. To recognize Jesus as God’s agent confirms that he, not the emperor, manifests God’s purposes (Ibid., p.333).

Christians are a “Community that participates in God’s empire.”

Hence, the things that Jesus has been doing in the Gospel readings for the Sundays after Pentecost are precisely the kind of actions we would expect of the Messiah, if we understand his work as the Servant’s service to God’s creation. 

Is such a reading legitimate?  Much of this, to be sure, we are reading into the text. We read it into the text from diverse sources: from the first lesson, from the scholar’s careful reading of the entire Gospel in the light of what he or she knows about the cultural context, and from the creation–interested agenda of Christians concerned with care of creation. We think it appropriate to engage the text in this manner, first of all, because given the nature of these resources, together they constitute an apt proposal regarding his interaction with the historical context provided by Matthew’s narrative. But equally important, especially considering that this reading takes place within the context of the Christian assembly for worship, we think it conforms to what Jesus himself anticipates will happen with Peter’s confession. It builds on that confession, as Carter puts it, to create “a community that participates in God’s empire.”

Peter’s confession is the “rock.”

The exchange between Peter and Jesus takes a surprising turn here: Having acknowledged the divine inspiration of Peter’s confession, Jesus goes on to say, “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Mt 16:19). Jesus shifts their focus from his own identity to that of Peter, and to the role that Peter and the other disciples will have in the future. 

This shift turns on the introduction of a new metaphor, that of “the rock.”  Quickly sorting the alternative interpretations of this much controverted saying, Carter takes Jesus’ reference to be “Peter’s faith or confession in 16:16,” albeit as embodied in the person of Peter as “the representative of every Christian,” (passing over the alternatives of “Christ” and “Peter the model bishop”) (Ibid., p. 334). But in the assembly this Sunday, hearers of the Gospel will catch the allusion to Isaiah 51:1 from the first lesson, for the sake of which, we surmise, the church has brought this lesson into juxtaposition to the Gospel. “Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug,” says the prophet. Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for he was but one when I called him, but I blessed him and made him many.” Here “the rock” is the founding couple of Israel and their faith.  And what does one see by looking to them? As we already noted above, we see the prophet’s promise that the Lord “will comfort Zion; he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord.”

To be sure, the prophet spoke in a different time and place.  But as we noted above, he spoke about what God does, and this is what the congregation will attend to. In addition, what God does, the Messiah, God’s commissioned agent, would surely also do, when and where the situation demanded it. The good shepherd attends to the needs of his sheep where they are at pasture. Does “the district of Caesarea Philippi” represent such a situation? We can’t say for sure, of course. But we can say with some confidence that Jesus himself would not contradict that possibility. His focus here is more general, but his intention is clear: Through the faith of Peter and his other disciples, Jesus will work to effect all such purposes as are consonant with the will of God for God’s empire wherever they may be called to do so.

As Carter adroitly observes, Jesus’ response quickly moves the conversation to a new levels, first political and then cosmic. On the rock of Peter’s confession of him as Messiah, he says, he will build his ecclesia. The word “ecclesia,” Carter insists, refers to more than we commonly understand as a religious community. “Frequently overlooked,” he notes, “is the observation that the term ekklesia is used in the political sphere. It denotes the ‘duly summoned’ . . .civic and political assembly of citizens in Greek cities which along with a council (the boule’) expressed the will of the assembled people (demos).  . . The assembly is not primarily cultic but political, social, cultural.  It gathers to reinforce and administer the status quo under Roman control. As R. A. Horsley notes in discussing Paul’s use of this term, by claiming the same name, the community centered on Jesus exists in ‘pointed juxtaposition’ and ‘competition’ with the official city assembly. . .(as) an alternative society to the Roman imperial order. . . rooted in the history of Israel, in opposition to Pax Romana. In God’s guidance of human affairs, history, which had been running through Israel and not through Rome,” continues in this counter society with its alternative commitment and practices (Ibid., p. 335).

The lesson is a message directed to creation itself!

In this light, the significance of the linkage between the gospel and the first lesson for our concern for care of creation grows. The “alternative commitment and practices” could certainly include, with full legitimacy, such activities as will further God’s will to “comfort all (Zion’s) waste places” and to “make her wilderness like Eden her desert like the garden of the Lord.”

Carol J. Dempsey makes note of this possibility in commenting on the first lesson: “Embedded in this text,” she writes, “is a message to the natural world as well. When Israel was redeemed from exile, the people were also restored to their land, which itself was restored to life after the ravages of the battles it endured. God’s words that promise restoration to Jerusalem’s waste places and deserts need to be heard by all environmentalists today working for the care, preservation, and restoration of the earth.  Indeed God is at work in their activity and their work is a sign of God’s saving grace in our midst” (Dempsey, ‘Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost / Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time,’ in New Proclamation Year A, 2002, p. 176).

The church has a mandate to care for creation

While we agree with Dempsey, we would restate her affirmation of care of creation much more broadly to include the whole community of the church. “Working for the care, preservation, and restoration of the earth” is something not only those who identify themselves as environmentalists do; consequent to our reading is commitment to such work as essential to the mandate of the community built on the rock of Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah. It is an important aspect of what those disciples are to “bind and loose” on earth, on behalf of the Father who is in heaven. As they work to understand and do “what God’s reign requires as declared by the scriptures and interpreted not by the religious leaders . . .but by Jesus, and by Peter and the disciples . . .all disciples are entrusted with the task of proclaiming and manifesting God’s empire (10:7-8)” (Ibid., p. 337). Because of the situation and condition of the Earth today, it is, we believe, part and parcel of what all Jesus’ followers are called out to do together, as Jesus’ ecclesia for our time and place.

The potential consequences of such action are, Jesus promises, cosmic:  “the gates of Hades will not prevail against” the work of the community so constituted and committed. “The phrase the gates of Hades,” Carter points out, “is metonymy in which a part (gates) refers to the whole realm of Hades. . . Hades, associated with the dead, contains the demons and evil spirits of death and destruction . . . Hades attacks Jesus’ community (as the rock is attacked in Mt 7:24-27; cf. 14:24). The gates of Hades open to let the attacking demons out. . . This attack is part of the eschatological woes which disciples experience as they conduct their mission before Jesus’ return.  . . . In Matthew 13:24-30, 38-39 the opposition comes from the devil. It can take all sorts of forms: domestic (Mt 10:21-22), and religious and social (Mt 10:17; 16:21), cultural (Mt 13:21-22), and political, since the devil claims control of the nations (Mt 4:8; cf. 10:17-18). But Jesus promises that this diabolical opposition will not prevail against the community centered on Jesus (Mt 13:36-43) (Ibid., p. 335).

Environmentalists: Your work is not in vain!!

Discouraged and pessimistic environmentalists, take note: Your work is not in vain. Heed the admonition of the Apostle Paul to the congregation in Rome, living in the shadow of the Empire’s capital: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2). Working together, thinking “with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned,” we will see the creation through its crisis in the good company of “the Lord, the Servant of Creation.” But there is also this: With Jesus’ promise, comes this cautionary word in next Sunday’s Gospel: If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Christian care of creation comes with sacrifice.

Who do you say I am? The Lord and Servant of Creation.

What is Jesus’ mission? To be shepherd to Israel.

As shepherd to his people, Jesus restores people and land!

Even in land “ruled” by the Roman Empire, the shepherd comes to restore the land.

Christians are a “Community that participates in God’s empire.”

The lesson is a message directed to creation itself!

 The church has a mandate to care for creation

 Environmentalists: Your work is not in vain!!

Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2011.
dennisormseth@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday August 14-20 in Year A (Ormseth)

If we are to address Earth-care together, no nation can claim privileged exceptionalism. – Dennis Ormseth  reflects on a global scope for the vision of well-being.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday August 14-20, Year A (2011, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
Psalm 67
Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
Matthew 15:[10-20] 21-28

Constructing political agreements to address on a global scale the degradation of the earth’s ecology is proving to be a nearly insurmountable challenge. As James Gustave Speth writes in an “anatomy of failure” of global environmental governance, environmental deterioration “is driven by powerful underlying forces; it requires far-reaching international responses; and the political base to support these measures tends to be weak and scattered.” These forces are quickly identified: “the steady expansion of human populations, the routine deployment of inappropriate technologies, the near universal aspiration for affluence and high levels of consumption, and the widespread unwillingness to correct the failures of the unaided market.” But the strategies needed to deal with these forces are very difficult to put in place. They need to be far-reaching and complex: new energy policies, new transportation strategies, changes in agriculture and the management of forests around the world. The required actions “demand international cooperation on a scale seldom achieved” (Speth, pp. 98-99).

The politics of such cooperation are exceedingly difficult: the issues are increasingly complex and difficult to understand; the impacts are remote or difficult to perceive; they concern future problems more than current ones, and problems that may be felt more immediately by other people in other places rather than close to home; and the problems tend to be chronic rather than acute. The political institutions needed for sustained and effective action are rarely strong enough. Economic needs regularly trump the needs of the environment. The wealthy global North protects its world dominance over against the poorer South. And particularly problematic is the persistence of the government of the United States in its arrogant attitude of exceptionalism, which undergirds a “pattern of unilateralism and of staying outside the multilateral system unless we need it—a la carte multilateralism” (Speth, pp.98 – 99, 107-11)

Can Christian churches contribute to the effort to meet this immense and daunting set of challenges? Without addressing specific issues identified by Speth, the lectionary lessons for this Sunday nonetheless point to resources within the tradition for helping the world deal with important, perhaps even crucial, aspects of them. The readings evince a powerful determination on the part of God to overcome the divisions that separate peoples from each other and work against their mutual well-being. Psalm 67, for example, reminds us that God’s people are to pray that God’s “way may be known upon earth, [God’s] saving power among all nations” (67:2; our emphasis). There is global scope to the vision of well-being for which we commonly pray, as in the words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.”

Furthermore, the challenge of bridging divisions between peoples is clearly addressed in the lesson from Isaiah 56; through the prophet, God promises to gather “the outcasts of Israel” and “others . . . besides those already gathered” (56:8). To the “foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be his servants, all who keep the Sabbath, and do not profane it, and hold fast my covenant—these,” the prophet promises on behalf of God, “I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer.” Interpreted in terms of the mission of Jesus, the Lord, the Servant of Creation, this promise means that those who minister to God and act as God’s servants will be co-servants with him in serving creation. Together with these strangers the people of God already gathered embrace the restoration of creation adumbrated in Jesus’ ministry: keeping the Sabbath rest, which encompasses all creatures in God’s own shalom, they join his ascent of the “holy mountain,” which is to say that, the representative ecology in which God, the creation, and the servants of creation are brought together in prayers of joyful praise and thanksgiving. “For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (56:7).

In the Gospel reading for the day we see how such promises might actually begin to be realized. The encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman offers a vision of how such deep divisions that prohibit the healing of creation might be overcome. Warren Carter describes the situation as follows:

Just as Jesus “came out” or left one place (Mt 15:21), the woman also “came out.” They meet in an unspecified “nowhere” place in the boundary region of Galilee and Tyre-Sidon, the interface of Jewish and Gentile territory. It is a place of tension and prejudice: Josephus declares  “the Tyrians are our bitterest enemies” (Con Ap 1.70), and there were clashes between Tyrians and Jews in the 60s (JW 2.478). Along with ethnic conflict, there are competing religious understandings (Israel is God’s chosen people), economic needs (the urban centers Tyre and Sidon require food from rural areas), and political goals. Tyrian political aspirations for further territory and resentment of Roman rule ran high. Josephus notes that many followers of John of Gischala, who revolted against Rome, came from ‘the region of Tyre” (JW 2.5888; cf. Vita 372). The woman comes not from the cities of Tyre or Sidon but from that region, suggesting perhaps her poverty as a rural peasant (Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, pp. 321-22).

Thus, in her appeal to Jesus as he enters the conflicted territory that separates her people from Jesus’ people, the woman confronts many of the complex factors that render political accommodation of any kind difficult, today no less than in the first century: rival populations struggle for control of contested territories and the resources they contain; the power and prerogatives of empire trump local concerns; and the resort to military power to guarantee access to material resources adds to the people’s sense of vulnerability and hopelessness. And figuring most prominently in their exchange is the challenge of the imperialistic ideology of Israel that, astonishingly, seems in the first instance to be even Jesus’ own point of deep resistance to her appeal.

Nevertheless, the woman draws on virtues she intuitively knows she can depend on for the response she seeks from Jesus: she cries out persistently, as in prayer, to one she acknowledges as Lord and son of David, challenging, as Carter puts it, “Jesus’ very identity and mission.” Her petition squarely confronts the ideology implied by that mission:

“her request has challenged his ideology of chosenness, which restricts his mission and his disciples mission to Israel. In the tradition of Abraham, she demands her share in God’s blessing for all the world (15:29-39; 1:1-2). Her request protests an excluding focus on Israel and reclaims her place as a Canaanite and a Gentile in God’s purposes” (Ibid., p. 323.)

When Jesus persists in his resistance she matches him with both wit and courage. In the crux of their exchange, so offensive to contemporary ears attuned to politically correct standards of speech, he supplies a metaphor that provides an impetus to transcend their conflict.” It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” he says. “Why does he use a food metaphor when she has not asked for food?” Carter astutely asks, and observes:

“Bread or food has also been an issue in two previous stories (12:7-8; 15:1-20) that have involved conflict between traditions and God’s will. Here the struggle concerns whether Jesus will be bound by cultural and historical conventions in resisting this woman from around Tyre and Sidon (see 15:21-22), or understand that faithfulness to his commission to manifest God’s saving reign does not violate Israel’s priority if he extends the reign to Gentiles. Food, then, is a metaphor for God’s empire or salvation (1:21, 23; 4:17)” (Ibid., p. 324).

So while his comment persists in maintaining “the status quo of ethnic, cultural, religious, gender, and political division, her response lays claim to his metaphor for her own cause: “Yes Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Thus, she reaches out

“beyond these barriers to possibilities that are faithful to God’s promises to bless all the nations of the earth (Gen 12:1-13). Without questioning the priority of the children (Israel), and while recognizing the authority of the masters, she reframes the significance of dogs (Gentiles). It is not a matter of food or no food (Jesus’ alternative), but food for both. . . . She demands a place at the table, not under it.”

What Carter calls attention to is the relationship between a master of the household and its domestic animals. Not only the children of the household receive the master’s care; the animals belong to the household as well, and cannot be denied the food that is appropriate to them. And, we note, this wild metaphorical stratagem of the woman triumphs!

Jesus has a name for her persistence: “Woman, great is your faith!” he exclaims. “Let it be done for you as you wish.” Indeed, the narrative has made the greatness of her faith very clear; she has overcome every obstacle. But it is important to see precisely what that faith is. It is clearly not faith in Jesus as the one who delivers special privilege and power to Israel among the nations, or, for that matter, to Christian believers. It is rather a faith in the gracious mercy of God that transcends all such “ethnic, gender, religious, political, and economic barriers.” And even more: we would suggest that her metaphor expresses a faith that overcomes the commonly assumed division between humans and their animal companions. Here, we might say, is faith in God as the creator of all who provides food for all. Her appeal is to a God for whom, in the vivid image of the woman’s plea, dogs are as welcome at the family table as are the children!

The implication for people of faith in the context of contemporary care of creation is clear: in the face of this woman’s faith in the God of all creation, whose healing servant she recognized in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the exceptionalist ideology of Israel or any other nation falls away. For this God, there is no barrier to restoration of all creation. This truth comes hard to Americans or citizens of any nation who expect from the rest of the world subservience to their unilateralist conceptions of fairness and justice. To embrace such faith can be painfully difficult, and especially so for those who have taken special pride in being recipients of God’s salvation. Indeed, in the reading from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, we see how painful this recognition was for even the great apostle of justifying faith. God, he acknowledges, has given everything to his people, and yet he must relinquish their exclusive claim in favor of God’s transcendent compassion and all-inclusive mercy. Even Jesus would seem to give up his people’s privileged status with great reluctance.

So we should not be surprised that it comes with great difficulty for a nation such as ours, so wonderfully blessed as America has been in this place, to acknowledge other nations’ claims on ecological equity and justice. Nor, for that matter, for the human species in relationship to the needs of the rest of God’s creation.  The woman transformed Jesus’ understanding of his mission in relationship to the purposes of God; who will change ours, so that the creation God so loves can be truly and finally restored?  The Christian community has this transformation of perspective and orientation to offer the nations of the world, in their quest for policies that address the dreadful reality of our degradation of God’s creation, with both compassion and justice for all.

 Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2011.
dennisormseth@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday August 7-13 in Year A (Thompson)

All-Encompassing, Hopeful, and Embodied Faith

This week Lutheran’s Restoring Creation is excited to offer a guest commentary from Andrew Thompson, a young adult seminarian.  In his commentary, Andrew reflects on God reaching us through our surroundings and how God’s active presence, within and beyond us, forms us for sustained action for the sake of the world.

LRC is always looking for new voices and diverse perspectives on the lectionary. Send an email to our commentary coordinator (contact@katrinamartich.com) to reserve a Sunday for your voice to be heard.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday August 7-13, Year A (2020, 2023)

1 Kings 19:9-18
Psalm 85:8-13
Romans 10:5-15
Matthew 14:22-33

Introduction

It’s no secret that the United States’ narrative of individualism and self-sufficiency has and is devastating our environment and many communities who are underrepresented in systems of power. Lutheran ethicist Cynthia Moe-Lobeda encourages an alternative way of understanding oneself and one’s spirituality which runs counter to these individualistic narratives that oppress our neighbors and God’s creation. Moe-Lobeda names this lens “Critical Mystical Vision,” which includes seeing “what is going on,” “what could be,” and “seeing ever more fully the sacred Spirit of life coursing throughout creation and leading it—despite all evidence to the contrary—into abundant life for all” (Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 113-114, Kindle). Moe-Lobeda planting her ethic in this ground of critically acknowledging one’s experience, seeing new pathways to take for the journey ahead, and God’s continued guidance towards that longed-for state of affairs of dynamic relationality offers hope for the journey and energy towards making it a reality (Resisting Structural Evil, 114, 120 Kindle). By continuing to develop the portrait of God actively abiding within us through creation, we are provided perspectives and practices which cultivate inspiring hope. This hope grounded in faith acknowledges despair and pain and seeks to do something about it, moving the parishes we serve and beyond towards a more communal worldview and brighter tomorrows.

1 Kings 19:9-19: Embodied Faith in the Sheer Silence

The Kings reading for August 9th begins this week’s expansion of this Western-influenced perspective of God. This exploration of Elijah’s story follows Elijah’s lone prophetic witness against four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal, which resulted in the LORD being revealed boldly to the community as the giver of water and fire, primary elements of sustenance and life (1 Kings 18:17-46). While this demonstrated God’s sovereignty as greater than the perceived power of Baal affirmed by members of the Israelite community and leadership at the time, Elijah also unsettled the status quo in the process, leading him to flee after Jezebel threatened his life (1 Kings 19:1-8). We enter into the 9th verse of chapter 19 with Elijah spending the night in seclusion within a cave in Mount Horeb, the site where God had cared for the Israelites with water from a stone and provided guidance in the form of a new covenant from a fire (Exodus 17:6; Deuteronomy 4:9-15).

God reaches out to Elijah, asking him why he is there. Elijah responds, explaining that he has continued to answer his call, and even so the present oppressive system continues to exploit the agrarian culture at the time for their own gain and idolatrous practices, thus breaking the covenant with God for the Israelite people to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5; Gale A. Yee, “1 Kings 17:1-22:53: The Ministries of the Prophets Elijah and Micaiah” in Fortress Press Commentary on the Bible: Two Volume Set, Gale A. Yee, Hugh R. Page Jr., Matthew J. M. Coomber, Margaret Aymer, Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, David A. Sánchez, eds. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014, Kindle). By breaking this covenant and exploiting the agrarian culture at the time, they also “[deprive] the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice,” as these vulnerable populations especially relied upon gleaning practices in the fields, as outlined in Deuteronomy as well (Deuteronomy 26:12-13, 27:19; Yee, “1 Kings 17:1-22:53,” Kindle). Elijah’s response to God feels drenched in the question of “Why?”—Why does this pain and suffering continue to happen, and why do my neighbors and your people continue to suffer as the covenant continues to remain unacknowledged and they seek to take my life? Elijah shares his story and experience with hopes that the status quo may be changed and seeks guidance about how to make that happen. How often do we find ourselves asking these questions too, especially when like it feels as though justice is nowhere to be found and God does not seem close by?

In their first exchange, God commands Elijah to go outside the cave and listen, “for the LORD is about to pass by” (1 Kings 19:11). We recall here that when Moses experienced God passing him by, he too was encouraged to stay by himself inside the cleft of a rock or a cavern (Exodus 33:20-23). At that moment, the very same signs that accompanied God’s presence listed in Isaiah 29:5-6 occur outside the cave, including a whirlwind so strong that it split the mountains, an earthquake, and then a fire (1 Kings 19:11-12). However, the writer(s) of 1 Kings reports that the LORD was not present in those spaces, and that after the fire there was “the sound of sheer silence” (1 Kings 19:13 NRSV). Elijah seems to have discerned that God’s presence was not communicated via the classic mediums for the divine to be revealed. Upon hearing the silence, however, Elijah responds to God’s invitation to leave the cave and experience the LORD passing by. Upon arriving at the entrance of the cave, God asks again what Elijah is doing at Mount Horeb. Elijah repeats his response, and this time the writer(s) reports that Elijah discerns how God will restore justice to the land, namely in the means they understood at the time, which was by putting righteous leaders back into leadership positions.

So, what changed between these two sets of questions and responses? God reveals Godself and the will of God in a vehicle that is atypical to how God has been most clearly revealed in the past to God’s people. The prophet Elijah thus receives a broader lens that God’s movement is not limited only to the more easily perceptible movements of nature or in bold displays of divine intervention. Instead, even in the absolute stillness of the air, God is still moving and is still present with God’s people—hearing the cry of the oppressed, stirring people’s hearts towards ensuring justice for the sake of the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner, and unsettling oppressive systems which seek to silence the voices of prophets who are speaking truth to power. God’s presence is not limited only to the mediums themselves, but it is communicated into us through such means. Whether it be within the cave, within the clouds, within the fire, within the water, within the stillness—God also stirs within us, towards our very innermost selves, to remind us of God’s abiding presence. God’s presence does not just linger there either. God’s presence communicated through these creative means revealed to Elijah the means for how justice would be offered in his time. God’s revelation to Elijah appears to have encouraged him to continue the work he has been called to do, as in the very next verse he goes forth to anoint Elisha, thus continuing the process of unsettling and dismantling the oppressive political system at the time.

The 1 Kings passage invites readers to reflect over two questions: How do you see God moving in this world and within you, and how are you going to respond? On the road of activism, silence can sometimes be viewed as a scary wall, indicating that one’s actions they once believed were in line with their vocation are actually running off track or are not making a difference. The question people in this position may encounter next is “What comes next?” This seems to be a root of the response Elijah offered to God’s question: “What are you doing here?” Through Elijah’s encounter with God in and through nature, he seems to have found an expanded perspective that is grounded in his continued faith and results in new directions to explore. While we treasure the narratives where God is moving in big and bold ways because they are exciting and often deliver the justice we long for on a daily basis, we are invited to expand our lens like Elijah so we may remember that milestone moments are not the only places where God is active. God is also present and moving in those moments which seem like anything other than momentous; we see here that God can use the stillness, the space we inhabit, the things we perceive and experience each as leaping off points to move us, and in the process reveals God’s will of compassion and justice. So, once the LORD passes by you in this way, what will you do next?

Psalm 85:8-13 and Romans 10:5-15 – God Revealed and Moving, Within and Beyond Ourselves

The readings for this week from Psalm 85 and Romans 10 offer more rich imagery which help us better engage Moe-Lobeda’s third aspect of Critical Mystical Vision: “seeing ever more fully the sacred Spirit of life coursing throughout creation and leading it—despite all evidence to the contrary—into abundant life for all” (Resisting Structural Evil, 114, Kindle). The psalm reading this week carries on the theme found in 1 Kings 19:9-18 of listening for God, who “…will speak peace to [God’s] people, to [God’s] faithful, to those who turn to [God] in their hearts” (Psalm 85:8 NRSV). This conception of God includes the idea that God’s glory (another term often associated with God’s abiding presence) dwells in our land, which the writer perceives as causing love, faithfulness, righteousness, and peace to also be gifted to the world by extension. What hopeful imagery associated with the fruits of listening and discerning God’s active presence amongst us! The writer perceives the world as being infused with the Spirit of life, and by extension finds hope in God’s presence.

In Psalm 85:11, we are treated to another set of rich imagery: “Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky.” It first casts an expansive view of the extent of God’s presence, as God’s presence is associated with both parts of the binary of up and down. This sentiment in Psalm 85:11 resonates with the ideas shared in the opening verses of the Romans reading, which encourages readers to not pin Christ’s presence to one place by assuming the righteousness associated with faith is found in one precise direction or space. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart” (Romans 10:8). The English translation offered by the NRSV here makes sense but misses out on just how connected the word is to God’s people, as the “on your lips and in your heart” literally translated from the Greek is “in your mouth (stoma) and in your heart.” The Greek presents God’s presence here as being very much internalized here. This internalized focus presents yet another dynamic portrait of God’s abiding presence within us while also including how God offers faith to us right where we are and that the righteousness of God saturates the very air we breathe. These images resonate with the comforting sentiment that our justifying, reconciling, and renewing faith itself is “sparked” by God, which orients the life we live in response (Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Article 4.73-74, 110-116 in Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds., The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000, p. 132, 138-139). Yet again we see how God oftentimes reveals God’s movement within us through these external means and empowers us to live in an awe-inspired and hope-filled manner if we remain tuned into God’s embracing movements.

We can see through these verses images which reflect the ongoing nature of God’s life-giving presence, whether it be within the rhythmic beats of our heart internally or a seed’s continued growth through the dirt. Both of these images are similar in the fact that they represent internal, life-giving processes which make action possible in the future. So too does the faith which springs up from the ground of our very being make possible the work we are called by God to do in this world. Such work is often hard and exhausting, and sometimes can feel as though we are stuck in the dirt; however, when we look out at the large trees and the many blades of grass tenaciously growing up and out in the air, we can see little reminders of God’s creative work in this world continuing every moment, with every breath we breathe, with whatever growth is sustained, and with every heartbeat, as the Word abides in each and every one of those spaces. We can go forth, knowing God has deeply rooted and nourished each of us in the ground from which faithfulness springs through the waters of our baptism and the Word. To use the words from the close of the Romans reading for this week, we are rooted yet are also sent as those beautiful messengers proclaiming God’s steadfast love, faithfulness, justice, and peace for the sake of the broader web of life, of which we too are a part and have been called to tend. The question remains, “How is God stirring you to live out the rooted-in-faith-life you have been freely given by God?”

Matthew 14:22-33 – An Invitation to Trust and Walk Upon the Mysterious Waves

The Gospel reading for this week continues our exploration of how cultivating Moe-Lobeda’s “Critical Mystical Vision” allows us to see the world through a hopeful, spiritually rich lens which informs bold action. This passage takes place in a chapter where Jesus finds out about John the Baptist’s execution at the hands of the corrupt political system run by King Herod, and seeks rest in solitude while in a boat upon the waters. He later returns to the crowds, and in his time with them communicated his compassion by curing the sick and showcasing the abundance of God by multiplying the small amount of food they had for the nourishment of all in attendance. Yet again, we see how God chooses to move through physical means to provide insights about God’s character and movement towards life for all.

After these acts of care and time spent with the community, the Gospel of Matthew reports that Jesus sent the disciples on a boat to go to the other side to Gennesaret, where Jesus and the disciples yet again engaged deeply with the community and Jesus provided care for them (Matthew 14:34-36). The journey in-between the two shores is our focus for this week, as the disciple’s boat is buffeted by what Bible scholar Douglas R. A. Hare refers to as waves which “tortured” the disciples. Hare minces no words about the dire predicament set before them, and that it is crucial to the narrative that this is when Jesus appears to the disciples, revealing that care and guidance are key aspects of Jesus’ activity as the Messiah (Douglas R. A. Hare, Matthew. Interpretation: Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. James Luther Mays, Patrick D. Miller Jr., and Paul J. Achtemeier, eds. Louisville: John Knox Press, 169). We see revealed through Jesus that God is caring and present with those amidst the storms of life, encouraging us to look out upon our respective communities for those we may accompany on the journey as well.

As we continue surveying the disciples experience upon the sea, we find the disciples looking out upon the roaring waters after a full night of wrestling with these waves to see a figure moving towards them. The disciples together “cried out in fear,” and immediately Jesus offers words of comfort (Matthew 14:26-27). At this point, Peter alone responds, asking Jesus to invite him on the waters too if his Lord is in fact there. Jesus offers the requested invitation. Peter then steps out upon the waves, begins to walk towards Jesus, and as he recognizes a strong gust of wind, he becomes frightened and begins to sink. As he sinks, he cries out to Jesus for deliverance, and Jesus immediately reaches out to catch him. Jesus encourages him to hold onto the faith he had which encouraged him to step out onto the water in the first place and then guides him back onto the boat, at which point the storm ceases and the disciples worship Jesus.

Hare’s analysis of this passage uplifts that Peter’s stepping upon the waves is unique to Matthew’s telling of the disciples’ storm experience, suggesting that Peter represents a key representation of “…what it means to be a Christian caught midway between faith and doubt” (Matthew, 169). Put another way, Peter represents to the reader the life of someone engaging in Critical Mystical Vision. The group on the waves originally saw Jesus as a ghost. Upon hearing the figure on the waves, Peter chose to see things differently, trusting in Jesus’ presence and asking to step out onto the risky waves with him. Now, this does not mean that Peter was ignorant of the surroundings he was in. The fact that he requested that Jesus himself command him upon the tempestuous waters suggests that he was critically aware of the space he was in, yet hoped through his faith that God’s power would be sufficient to carry him on the way (Hare, Matthew, 170). Even when the situation shifted and his faith was shaken by the wind, Peter again cried out in hope that Jesus would hold him up when Peter alone could not. Jesus immediately responded, and upon returning with Peter to the boat, the disciples cried out in worship, claiming Jesus as the Son of God.

And why these immediate turns to praising Jesus? My guess is this is not only because the storm had subsided. Instead, Jesus communicated clearly to these disciples that he is there to continue providing care for them, even when he had perhaps appeared distanced from them when he went away to the mountain to pray (Matthew 14:23). Moreover, Peter stepped out in hope, and although the journey took a different path than he perhaps had expected, he encountered Christ. Peter chose to see with hope, and his life and the disciples lives were changed by the experience that followed. Even though he fell into the waters, had he not trusted in his faith and seen the figure only as a specter or something to tempt him, then he likely would not have had the experience which revealed a whole new relational dimension between him and Christ. Their awareness of Christ’s presence and care for them deepened immensely through his accompanying them in the storm and upon the very waters that threatened their boat. This is not to say that Peter saw everything as safe or rosy. It is clear that Peter was abundantly aware of the stormy waves; however, he fixated upon Christ for the first steps into new understanding (Hare, Matthew, 170). Through Peter’s hope and through the storm God revealed new depths to Peter’s faith. Yet again, God moves amidst nature and the discerning heart towards communicating new truths about who God is and who we are called to be in response.

The waves can represent the mysterious, presently-uncharted places for us. As we continue wrestling with how we are to answer our call to love our neighbor amidst this complex world, we find hope in the truth revealed in this passage that Jesus is already ahead of us in those currently mysterious spaces. We experience the tug to move just as Peter was called by Jesus upon the waters. We trust that Christ is with us upon those waves, ready to catch us if we begin to sink. We believe Christ still invites us to live into the faith sparked within us for the sake of those experiencing the pain and fear associated with the tumultuous waves of this life. So, where is Jesus ahead of you, providing hope for the journey ahead and calling you to join him amidst the storms which visit us in this life for the sake of those whose are being engulfed by the waves?

Questions to Ponder and Embody in Hope

Elijah, the Psalmist, Paul, and Peter each saw the world with hope and faith that God was moving and was encouraging them to move as well. They each experienced hardship and saw that the road towards living out their call was one that had obstacles and risks along the way. However, they also saw the dynamic presence of God moving on the road, both within their very bodies and alongside them in God’s creation. Out of this deeper perception and God’s reminder of God’s compassionate presence, they continued to move forward in hope that God’s will might be done through them, not for their own sake, but because they were obligated to do so by our Creator and Sustainer, and because they saw the world needed it. The questions raised by these readings before us then as called and claimed children of God are: What do we perceive? In what ways is God moving within us and within our surroundings? Where are the stormy waves God invites us to walk upon? What will we do in response as we live rooted and fixed upon the faith offered to us by God? We live out of our embodied faith and experience. We reflect on what could be with hope inspired by God’s will of justice, compassion, and dynamic relationality. We continue to step out upon the waters to which we are called, listening for God’s continued presence and guidance, whether it be found on the waves, in the fires, in the wind, in the silence, in our words, or within our very hearts. May we view the world through the “Critical Mystical Vision” Moe-Lobeda describes, trusting that God is renewing us as faith springs up from the ground to which we have been rooted, that God sends us with hope, and that God invites us to embody the insights gained from God’s movement in nature towards our very internal selves for the sake of the world.

Andrew Thompson
athompson5@capital.edu

Andrew Thompson is a second year Master of Divinity, Word and Sacrament Track, student at Trinity Lutheran Seminary at Capital University. Andrew graduated from Capital University in 2019 with a BA in Religion and Philosophy, and much of his work embraced an eco-theological framework. Andrew presented eco-theological work at several undergraduate conferences, created an eco-theologically-centered campus ministry outline and program content for his senior thesis, and also served as a camp counselor at a Lutheran Outdoor Ministries in Ohio camp. Andrew hopes to serve the world and the church as a campus pastor, and as a continued advocate and ally for environmental justice.

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday July 31 – August 6 in Year A (Carr)

Incline Your Ear and Listen Carefully  – Amy Carr reflects on our response to grief, anguish, and the temptation to despair.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday July 31 – August 6, Year A (2020, 2023)

Isaiah 55:1-5
Psalm 145:8-9, 14-21
Romans 9:1-5
Matthew 14:13-21

Lutheran ethicist Cynthia Moe-Lobeda has always impressed me with her careful attention not only to the demands of justice, but also to the fatigue and hopelessness that can accompany awakening to the enormity of structural injustice—especially the enormity of climate crisis. To put it in terms familiar to Luther, Pascal, and centuries of monastics attentive to the ways we resist contending with sin: if false presumption that all is well is one half of our planetary challenge (or what Moe-Lobeda calls “moral oblivion” in Chapter 5 of Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation, Fortress, 2013), then despair is the spiritual danger that emerges once we are woke to the damage we are doing and facing collectively, as global temperatures rise.

Our scriptural texts for today reckon with the temptation to despair. Each is situated in a state of anguish about something that has come to pass, or that refuses to come to pass. Divine creativity appears within a space of openly knowing and naming that anguish.

Matthew 14:13-21: Losing John, Becoming Elisha: Grief and the Power of Multiplication

In The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation, Matthew 14:13 sets a story of Jesus’ feeding multitudes in the context of the finale of John the Baptist at the hands of Herodias: “When Jesus heard about the beheading, he left Nazareth by boat and went to a deserted place to be alone.”

Never before had I noticed that Jesus’ multiplication of a few loaves and fish to feed 5000 families was a gesture born not only of compassion, but amid grief. Jesus performed this act only after first trying to get away from Nazareth to be alone to mourn the execution of his imprisoned mentor, John the Baptist. But the urgent desire of other human beings for what Jesus himself offered led them to follow on foot to where they saw his boat land. When Jesus “saw the vast throng, his heart was moved with pity, and he healed their sick” (Matthew 14:14, Inclusive Bible).

Like Elisha, who multiples oil for a prophet’s wife in need (2 Kings 4:1-7) only after his mentor Elijah has been taken by God, Jesus’ own power seems to become magnified when John the Baptist has been taken by Herod’s family. Moreover, the crowd that follows Jesus into his grief-space in the wilderness echoes the story of the Hebrews who leave Egypt for the hopes of a better life; as they were fed with manna at Moses’ command, so too is the crowd that follows Jesus fed by his blessing of a few loaves and fish.

Out of grief from one loss comes compassion for many who are lost; out of the loss of a mentor comes a new identity as one who is as powerful as any of the great prophets in Israel’s history. Such greatness is bred not in self-seeking, but in mourning and in its capacity to deepen sensitivity to the suffering of others. It is as if the wider Jesus’ heart, the more he is able to give—even unto as God alone can give.

Like Jesus, many are drawn to wilderness spaces to gain clarity, perspective, a renewed vision. But today we are also aware of deserted places as themselves vulnerable to destruction. And what kinds of healing and acts of multiplication might we find ourselves expressing as baptized members of the body of Christ who move through the grief about the effects of climate change into compassionate responses? Perhaps our responses involve advocacy about public policy, or direct service to those whose lands and livelihoods are destroyed, or a found capacity to survive our own loss of home to flood or extreme weather. Maybe we plant trees and pollinator crops. Perhaps we hold the truths of the world in prayer, so as to strengthen others engaged in response.

Certainly, like Jesus’ disciples, we may wrestle with doubt about whether or not we have the capacity to meet the gravity of the need. We might resist literal or glib readings of the feeding-of-the-5000 story that focus on its miraculous nature and leave us feeling either incredulous, or inadequate to the faith needed to perpetuate such a miracle in Jesus’ name today. But perhaps those worries miss the boat Jesus was actually taking. Our journey is with the heart of Jesus, and here Jesus’ heart begins with his disorientation about losing a fixture in his sense of the world and of his own vocation: the formative presence of John the Baptist. Within that space of grief—opened to in a deserted place—came an upwelling of compassion for those who seek healing and nourishment.

Can’t we make that journey together as well, from loss of anchor to depth of commitment, as we face the disorienting disruption of our assumption that the earth and its species will continue as we know them?

Romans 9:1-5: Anguish about the Unwoke

The anguish expressed in Romans 9:1-5 reminds us that the richest theological understanding arises only as we claim our emotional truths—including our emotional truths about those who seem to stand against the very projects of redemption and salvation in which we invest.

In Romans 9, Paul tells us that his “conscience confirms . . . by the Holy Spirit” that he has “great sorrow and unceasing anguish in [his] heart,” to the point that he wishes that he himself “were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of [his] own people,” the Israelites (Romans 9:1-3, NRSV). We are not told why he is so distraught in Romans 9:1-5; here we need to read further to learn that Paul is anxious because only a “remnant” of his fellow Israelites are being “saved” by no longer “seeking to establish their own” righteousness, but believing in God’s righteousness that now comes through faith in Christ (Romans 9:27, 10:2-10).

Yet it is precisely in expressly fully his longing for fellow Israelites to regard Christ as he himself does, and in letting loose multiple exegetical arguments for his view of justification by faith in Christ, that Paul stumbles into a way of affirming a “mystery”: that “all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:25-26). He cannot fathom it, really: “How unsearchable are [God’s] judgments and how inscrutable [God’s] ways!” (Romans 11:33). But Paul observes that Israel’s God has had a long pattern of electing some people over others for the purposes of covenant-making (Abraham; Isaac over Ishmael; Jacob over Esau), and of hardening the hearts of some (like Pharaoh before Moses) to show forth divine power (Romans 9:6-18). So Paul concludes that it is God who had destined most Israelites not to believe in Jesus as Messiah, precisely so that more Gentiles can be grafted into the covenant (Romans 11:7, 11, 17-20). Ultimately, however, “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable;” God will not abandon God’s own people, only temporarily imprison them—indeed, all—“in disobedience so that [God] may be merciful to all” (Romans 11:29, 32).

Here Paul’s anguish signals his inability to consent to the exclusion of his own people from belonging still to God, even if most of them fail to see salvation shining in the new covenant revealed in the story of the particular Jew who re-sets the world for Christians. In Paul’s exegetical searching, he finds a way of discerning God’s providence at work in the very hardening of hearts—against the new covenant in Christ—that so disturbs him.

Post-Holocaust Christians and Jews have gathered around Romans 9-11 as a fruitful oasis for imagining a non-supersessionist way of connecting Jewish and Christian covenants. Might we learn anything comparably fruitful as we consider Paul’s generative anguish in light of climate crisis?

In the presidential primary debates among Democratic candidates for President, I noticed that most voiced agony about climate change and pledged to make it a priority. Many also complained about the “climate change deniers” in the Republican Party. They cast a narrative of Democrats who are woke vs. Republicans who are self-blinded—their hearts hardened against seeing and reckoning with the depths of planetary peril.

We can go only so far with analogies between climate change deniers and Paul’s fellow Israelites—those who so distressed him with their refusal to wake up to the salvation that rescued him from being himself a hardened zealot who had persecuted those who followed the Way of Jesus. But Paul did not give up seeing himself and his fellow Israelites as belonging to one another and to God, even though he thought they were wrong in thinking that the Torah rather than Christ should be their basis of identity. Can we likewise ask ourselves, as Christians concerned about climate crisis, how to see God’s hand at work in those who deny the basic facts of climate change, as we see them?

We can be as prone to presumption about our own righteousness when we feel woke to a profound problem as when we delude ourselves into believing all is well, when it is not. Paul warns Gentile believers against thinking too highly of themselves in relationship to Israelites who reject salvation in Christ (Romans 11:17-18). Likewise, we are missing the mark if we focus more on our sense of being in the right about climate change than on finding common cause with all persons to address the actual challenges we face together. Perhaps that is a minimal kind of providence we can discern as we grapple with those who deny the science of climate change: a warning against liberal self-righteousness as an end in itself—as if, like Jonah, we would rather be right as we wait to witness the destruction of Nineveh than to care about Nineveh’s people and animals and reach out from the heart of anguish and compassion to our political enemies, towards whom God’s concern also extends (Jonah 4:9-11).

Romans 9:1-5 sets us solidly in anguish—not self-righteousness—as the starting place for moving toward those who oppose us.

Isaiah 55:1-5: Funeral Feasts and Listening toward Restoration

 So much voiced in the psalms and prophets is counter-factual—announcing a state of affairs in which God is ultimately making all things well, even when the current moment is a disaster. And sometimes stirred into the prophet’s vision-pot is anticipation of a wider covenant—a home-going after exile that is not a nostalgic return to what had been, but instead a new kind of homemaking, with foreigners now joining in.

In Isaiah 55:1-5, the prophet calls those exiled from Jerusalem to come join a free feast, anticipating a return from exile. Those who are dead to their old lives are addressed with the same word used to call forth the dead to a ritual meal on their behalf: “Ho!” (Isaiah 55:1). But the richness of the food also evokes a royal banquet, and for Christians, the Lord’s Supper that both memorializes Jesus’ death and provides a foretaste of “the feast to come” in the fullness of the Kingdom or (in Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz’ famous words) the Kindom of God.

The prophet knows we need to “listen carefully” from within our current grief, responding to the call to eat “rich food” that we “may live,” as God makes with us “an everlasting covenant” (Isaiah 55:2-3)—one that stretches to include “nations that you do not know” who shall run to the very people in exile “because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel” (Isaiah 55:5).

As Christians, we hear in these prophetic words an anticipation of how Gentiles—“the nations”—will run to Jesus as the Anointed One of God. And as those inspired by the global movement of young people skipping school to demand that all nations respond to climate crisis, we might also hear the voice of Greta Thunberg, a teenager from Sweden, calling like Isaiah to listen, that we may live.

To find our way to the promised feast, we have to “incline [our] ear” (Isaiah 55:3) and figure out where God is inviting us. That is the hard part, of course: how do we move from exile to restoration, from lifeways that continue to damage our planet to a serious commitment to reverse our course in a way inclusive of all persons and institutions, from every walk of life and business? (For some prophetic-styled depictions of resistant-to-proactive responses among a range of industries, see Schumpeter, “The Seven Ages of Climate Man: A Shakespearean guide to how companies tackle change,” The Economist, 5-25-19, https://www.economist.com/business/2019/05/23/a-shakespearean-guide-to-how-firms-tackle-climate-change.)

We do not lack for prophets today. As in Isaiah’s time, the challenge is to incline our ear to listen to them—and, as Isaiah urges, to trust the promise that our response to God’s invitation to restoration matters.

The Psalm reminds us that the wider creation is included in the streaming-forth to rejoice together before God: “The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season;” “and all flesh will bless [God’s] holy name forever and ever” (Psalm 145:15, 21).

Dr. Amy Carr
amyreneecarr@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday July 24-30 in Year A (Ormseth)

Feast on These Parables from Nature! – Dennis Ormseth  reflects on the messy business of God’s kingdom.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday July 24-30, Year A (2011, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

1 Kings 3:5-12
Psalm 119:129-136
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Our reflection on the teaching of Jesus, the Lord, the Servant of Creation, continues to explore themes significant for caring for creation days in a medley of new parables: the Mustard Seed; the Yeast, Treasure Hidden in a Field; A Merchant in Search of Fine Pearls; and a Net Thrown into the Sea. As with the parables from the previous two Sundays, our reading brings out new treasures along with the old treasures (Matthew 13:51). Similarly, the reading from Romans continues from where we left off last Sunday, in considering life in the Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life. We turn first to the teaching of Jesus the Servant of Creation.

The mustard seed: What a strange mess is this kingdom! The parable begins with signs of the unclean, a planting in a garden, and will not meet grandiose expectations. Yet. . . the birds will find shelter in its shade.

The Mustard Seed. Again we encounter a sower planting seed, and, again, like the sowers who cast the seed wildly and forgot to protect the field from alien intruders, the action of the sower strikes us as unlikely. A farmer in the ancient world would normally not sow a mustard seed in the midst of his field. As Bernard Brandon Scott point out, “the mustard, a common plant in the eastern world, grew and spread quickly. Consequently, a farmer sought to control its seeds.” The plant, this comment suggests, was regarded somewhat as we would an evasive species. More importantly, in Jewish tradition, the action of sowing depicted here could be seen as a violation of the “rules of diverse kinds.” These rules “had as their purpose to bring order into the disorderly world, and the creation of order in this world replicates the division between the sacred and the profane. Where things could or could not be planted and what could be planted or mixed together were important for the maintenance of purity boundaries.” Following other commentators, Scott notes that “a mustard seed could not be planted in a garden,” where vegetables would be the usual planting. And it could be planted in a field only in carefully proscribed spaces. The parable thus begins with “a metaphor of impurity.” The sower “has risked breaking the law of diverse kinds by mixing what should not be mixed. . .” (Scott, Hear Then the Parable:  A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus, pp. 374-76, 381). How is the kingdom of heaven like a sower who proceeds in such a disordered, unholy manner?

The focus of interpretation, of course, is usually more on the seed than the sower, precisely because the seed is very small, and the tree that grows from it, at least in the parable, is “the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree.” The parable is about astonishing growth, this suggests:  the kingdom, though small and hidden, will become very large and impressive, thus confirming its divine character. This perhaps makes good sense for us, for whom growth is culturally taken to be a nearly unmitigated good. However, that would not have been true for the ancient farmer, for whom the growth of an invasive species like the mustard seed had to be seen as an agricultural disaster! Nor is it true for an ecologically aware reader, who would appreciate the possible harm to be done to the field. As Scott notes: “The seed’s planting and its growth create a conflict for a hearer. Is this growth a divine blessing or a violation? Is it clean or unclean? How is one to decide?” (Ibid., p. 383).

To make things worse, in a sense, the parable’s shrub outgrows the normal limits of its “kind,” to become a tree. No anticipation of Darwinian evolution, this; on the contrary, this transformation is miraculous: the shrub is transformed into a “mixed allusion” familiar to the ancient hearer as the “eschatological tree of Ezekiel and Daniel,” which, like the great cedar of Lebanon, shelters not only birds in its branches, but underneath them, gathers “all the creatures of the earth.” Scott concludes: ‘A hearer is left to make sense, to fit together a mustard plant that has pretensions to the grandeur of a cedar of Lebanon. How that resolution takes place leads from story to kingdom” (Ibid., p. 385-86).

The parable makes a light-hearted burlesque of the noble cedar as a metaphor for the Kingdom of God by substituting the mustard shrub.

Scott concludes: the parable “makes a light-hearted burlesque of the noble cedar as a metaphor for the Kingdom of God by substituting the mustard shrub.” Although a symbol of both strength and protection, the cedar also represents pride: “A Grain of Mustard Seed extends the logic of Ezekiel [17]. All cedars and trees, even Israel, will be brought low.” It is the lowly mustard bush, scandalously planted in the field of the world that both political and religious authorities seek to keep well-ordered according to a static conception of the creation, that “will ‘bear Israel’s true destiny’” (Ibid., p. 386; Scott cites Robert W Funk, Jesus as Precursor, for this point). Still, significantly, the mustard bush does what the cedar would do: provide shelter for the birds of the air. “The parable begins with signs of the unclean, a planting in a garden, and will not meet grandiose expectations. Yet. . . the birds will find shelter in the shrub’s shade. Many have preferred the mustard tree, this unnatural malformity of mythical botany, to the recognition that God’s mighty works are among the unclean and insignificant” (Ibid., p. 387).

A tree does not exist for itself alone, but for others. So it is with those who are part of the kingdom of God!

The sower, we note, might well have his own purposes: to provide a niche for creatures that do not easily fit into the economic calculations of our agricultural, “growth” obsessive, economy. A field on the University of Minnesota agricultural campus in St. Paul had for years several large cages to trap birds that disrupted the research conducted in it. A sower who deliberately seeds a tree to host birds in the midst of his field is of a different mind-set, a servant of all creation, perhaps, who meets the needs all creatures (sometimes by creative adaptation, even!), and not only those of human beings. In good ecological form, whether mighty cedar or lowly mustard, the tree does not exist for itself alone, but for others. So it is with those who are part of the kingdom of God!

The Yeast.  The parable of the yeast begins in a way similar to the Mustard Seed, with a highly ambiguous image of growth. Scott calls the parable “one rotten apple.” The yeast, a woman, and her kneading the dough, combine to offer an image of impurity. As Scott notes, yeast (leaven) “is made by taking a piece of bread and storing it in a damp, dark place until mold forms. The bread rots and decays, unlike modern yeast, which is domesticated.” Leavened bread was for everyday use; only unleavened bread was appropriate for holy days (Ibid., p. 324). The negative connotations of “leaven” are familiar: “the involvement with even a little evil can corrupt the whole,” and Matthew elsewhere associates leaven with the “teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees (16:12).” How, the hearer must ask, “can the kingdom be like leaven?” (Scott, pp. 324-25) As to the woman, Scott quotes Albrecht Oepke: “Characteristic of the traditional position and estimation of woman is a saying current in different forms among the Persians, Greeks and Jews in which man gives thanks that he is not an unbeliever or uncivilized, that he is not a woman and that he is not a slave.”

Three measures of flour is a metaphor for divine largess.

By way of contrast, the three measures of flour is a metaphor for divine largess. The large amount is evocative of the story of Abraham’s reception of three visitors, Gideon’s preparation for the visitation of the angel of the lord, and Hannah’s gift for the dedication of the temple. Thus the parable suggests, “not only are three measures much more than normal but that the amount is connected with an epiphany,” an image that coheres with the “kingdom of God.” “Yet how is a hearer to combine three measures with the preceding negative terms?” (Ibid., p. 326-27) Scott refuses to dodge the strikingly messy implications:

The kingdom (the holy and good) is pictured in terms of an epiphany of corruption. How radical is the parable’s intention? Does it mean to state that good is evil in an ethics of absurdity? Or is its function to subvert a hearer’s ready dependency on the rule of the sacred, the predictability of what is good, and warn that instead the expected evil that corrupts may indeed turn out to be the kingdom.

Would not a teacher who is the Servant of all Creation, who indeed saves the whole creation by dying on a cross, be entirely at home in a kingdom of God that embraces the awful messiness of life on the earth?

Or again, we would add, would not a teacher who is the Servant of all Creation, who indeed saves the whole creation by dying on a cross, be entirely at home in a kingdom of God that embraces the awful messiness of life on the earth?

 Treasure Hidden in a Field.  Once more we are confronted by a dilemma, the problem, as Scott names it, of “Finders Keepers:”

“If the treasure belongs to the finder, buying the land is unnecessary.  But, if the treasure does not belong to the finder, buying the land is unjust.”  If the dayworker has claim to the treasure, he has no need to rehide the treasure and buy the land. He can simply claim the treasure. That he does rehide the treasure and buy the land indicates that he does not believe he can make such a claim. Also, from the point of view of narrative structure, a hearer discovers that the finder is not the landowner only when he buys the field, thus concentrating narrative attention on the buying. The structure of the line involves finding and joy/selling and buying. But because buying signifies that he does not own, does not owning call into question the joy of finding? (Ibid., pp. 399-400; the quotation in italics is from Dominic Crossan, Finding is the First Act, with his emphasis).

Treasure receives its value, its joy, because it appears outside the bounds of the everyday. It is an occurrence that breaks expectations and interrupts the everyday.

The kingdom of God is like finding the treasure, suggests Scott, in that “treasure receives its value, its joy, because it appears outside the bounds of the everyday. It is an occurrence that breaks expectations and interrupts the everyday. Because it is not something earned or labored for but something found, it is lawless. Its joy is precisely in its lawlessness, its unearned, not worked for character” (Scott, pp. 401-02).

What if the kingdom of God is like a person who walking in the woods and discovers an endangered spotted owl?

We can suggest a contemporary analogy: A person walking in the woods discovers a creature, a spotted owl, say, in any case, an individual animal belonging to an endangered species. In his joy, he resolves to buy or otherwise get control of that patch of woods; for only by preserving that habitat does the owl have a chance of survival. But who owns the woods? In order to “save” the owl, he has to sue the owner to limit his control over use of the woods. Is this a proper action driven by great joy? Only by keeping the owl hidden in the woods is there a chance of sustaining that experience of joy in the presence of the beautiful creature. Or is the action an unjust transgression of property rights, sanctioned by environmental laws that the owner has to regard as an unconstitutional deprivation of his property rights? What if the kingdom of God is like a person, who walking in the woods, discovers a spotted owl?

That is the kingdom’s corrupting power—the desire to possess it!!

A Merchant in Search of Fine Pearls.  The dilemma of this parable builds on an aspect of the parable of the treasure hidden in a field. As ownership of the field and the treasure within it calls into question the possibility of sustaining the joy of discovery, so does ownership of the pearl of great value complicate the life of the merchant. Scott captures the point succinctly: “If to buy the pearl he has sold off his capital, whether all he owns or his merchandise, he will again have to sell the pearl, or else he will be broke, because the pearl only generates in being sold. Thus the thing of value, the pearl, has no ultimate value.” The kingdom of God is like that, Scott suggests, in that it “cannot be possessed as a value in itself . . . for the merchant will sooner or later have to sell his pearl. And that is the kingdom’s corrupting power—the desire to possess it” (Ibid., p. 319). Might one not say the same for God’s creation?

A Net Thrown into the Sea. Has the hearer been caught within the net of these parables, the teaching of Jesus, the Servant of Creation? Are those caught up in his net—members of his church—good fish or rotten fish? Which side of the parable’s various dilemmas do they fall out on? The sorting out into baskets is indeed something to be reserved for the end, when the angels of God will bring final clarity to our relationship with the creation and our relationship with the creation’s creator. Until then, we swim with all the rest of the fish, utterly dependent for our very lives on the environing sea, chaotic as it may sometimes appear to be. For to be taken out of water is for fish or for any species to die.

The creation is bound up with humanity—and the Spirit is in a solidarity of shared groaning and, similarly, a shared hope.

An ear for the groaning of creation.  The parable of  “A Net Thrown into the Sea’ thus returns us, we would suggest, to the narrative about creation which David Horrell, Cherryl Hunt and Christopher Southgate construct on the basis of the “ecotheological mantra text,” namely, Romans 8:18-25. As we argued in our comment on that reading a week ago, the parables of Jesus share a narrative of creation that is strikingly similar to the one these scholars identify as key to understanding Paul’s view of the relationship between “the children of God” and the non-human creation (See our comment on the readings for last weekend). As we summarized their argument,

Paul teaches that a creation “enslaved-to-decay has been subjected to futility by God.” But that it was “subjected in hope” means “that the focus, from the subjection onwards, is entirely forward-looking; there is no description of the act of creation, no indication as to what (if anything) preceded its subjection to futility.” The “co- groaning” and “co-travailing” has been the state of creation since its subjection; the creation is “bound up with humanity and the Spirit in a solidarity of shared groaning and, similarly, a shared hope.”

In terms of the parable of the Net Thrown into the Sea, for the time being, we swim in the sea while drawn toward the light of the final judgment of God regarding our relationship with God and God’s creation. But as “children of God,” we do not swim aimlessly, or alone. The Spirit of God, the Lord, the Giver of Life, present at creation, sustainer of all of life, accompanies us on this great migration. As Paul writes, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness.” In our “co-groaning and “co-travailing,” the Spirit “intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (8:26-27). It is on this account, and this only, that “we know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” And if we give “all things” a strong reading as intending the fullness of creation, as it does elsewhere in Paul’s writings, rather than simply the particular occasions of trial and suffering for which we usually appropriate it, we are indeed encouraged to look and to live forward in hope for the full realization of the purposes of God and for the complete restoration of creation.

Feast on these Parables from Nature! The Kingdom is Messy Business Indeed!

The mustard seed: What a strange mess is this kingdom! The parable begins with signs of the unclean, a planting in a garden, and will not meet grandiose expectations. Yet. . . the birds will find shelter in its shade.

The parable makes a light-hearted burlesque of the noble cedar as a metaphor for the Kingdom of God by substituting the mustard shrub.

A tree does not exist for itself alone, but for others. So it is with those who are part of the kingdom of God!

Three measures of flour is a metaphor for divine largess.

Would not a teacher who is the Servant of all Creation, who indeed saves the whole creation by dying on a cross, be entirely at home in a kingdom of God that embraces the awful messiness of life on the earth?

Treasure receives its value, its joy, because it appears outside the bounds of the everyday. It is an occurrence that breaks expectations and interrupts the everyday.

What if the kingdom of God is like a person who walking in the woods and discovers an endangered spotted owl?

That is the kingdom’s corrupting power—the desire to possess it!!

The creation is bound up with humanity—and the Spirit is in a solidarity of shared groaning and, similarly, a shared hope.

Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2011.
dennisormseth@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday July 17-23 in Year A (Ormseth)

Desist from Ecological Destruction, NOW! – Dennis Ormseth  reflects on the ecological integrity of all things.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday July 17-23, Year A (2011, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

Isaiah 44:6-8 or Wisdom 12:13, 16-19
Psalm 88:12-25
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Notice the ecology of these parables!

The Parable of Weeds among the Wheat follows immediately on the reading of the Parable of the Sower and its explanation, both in Matthew’s narrative and in the lectionary last Sunday and this Sunday. Comparison of the two parables is instructive. The parables share important elements of interest to the reader concerned with care of creation. Although Jesus’ purpose in telling the story is to instruct the disciples concerning the growth of their community, the story locates that community in relationship to Earth. The parables share a narrative structure that moves from sowing to sprouting to harvest. They both have a very simple, relational, if not explicitly ecological, perspective, namely, seeds need to be matched to soil, and roots hidden beneath the soil are intertwined and cannot be separated without killing the plant. Finally, in both parables, the seed represents the potential growth of the community of Jesus’ followers. The kingdom of heaven on earth, we might conclude, conforms in important ways to the regular processes of creation. Like the parable of the Sower, the parable of weeds among the wheat is a story that the Lord, the Servant of Creation, would have loved to tell.

There are significant contrasts between the parables as well. Here the parable of the Weeds among the Wheat is explicitly introduced as a means to understanding the kingdom of heaven, a point that was only an unspoken assumption in relation to the parable from last Sunday. Warren Carter plausibly suggests that the aim is “to direct the audience to think about the story in relation to God’s empire, but leaves it to the audience to discern connections” (Carter, Matthew and the Margins:  A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, p. 288). Here the seed is declared good, and the field is the sower’s own property—both factors unmentioned in the first story. The new parable involves more human characters: a lone sower in the first parable, here a landowner with his household slaves, and also the unidentified “enemy” who comes in the night to sow weeds among the wheat and then disappears. The more complex operation of the household economy contrasts significantly with the simple agrarian image of the solitary peasant sower.

 This comparison illumines an important feature of the context implied by this Sunday’s parable.  It is a context in which considerable control over the land is presupposed:  it is land that is owned as part of an estate with slaves. The land is under regular, organized cultivation, where care is taken to see that the seed is good quality, and slaves or servants appropriately share the landowner’s concern about the yield. One suspects that the careless sower of last Sunday’s parable might not last long in this company. And, notably, the slaves expect to be directed into the field to violently uproot the weeds. Carter’s point about empire is well taken: the social location is an organized economy, which is being disrupted by an alien agent, in a conflicted cultural environment.

In contrast to the Roman Empire, the Empire of God is creative and life-giving.

Yet the empire of God is different: evocative of a highly organized economy though the narrative might be, the images remain agrarian. As Carter observes, “The scene of growing wheat suggests that God’s empire is creative and life-giving in providing food to sustain life, in anticipation of the abundance that will mark its full establishment” (Ibid., p.288-9). Furthermore, when the weeds sown by the enemy are discovered, the landowner restrains the slaves, saying “let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn” (13:30).  The point is clearly to keep the plants in the earth until they are ripe, well beyond the time their true character has been revealed, so that the harvest of the yield of the good seed can be as full and complete as possible.

As before, Jesus is not instructing his followers in agronomy; he makes use of what would be largely common sense for most everyone in an agrarian culture, to set out what would be uncommon sense under an imperial regime.  The powerful typically get rid of those in opposition to them by “rooting them out” without regard to collateral damage, in the phrase of our day. We have the technological means to do this now: well-designed herbicides can do precisely what mechanical row hoes have done clumsily. But political applications of the policy are still very costly of life. For example, some do it with no concern for collateral damage, like the well-intended but unthinking slaves in the parable, do the damage by incurring unintended consequences. Others heedlessly and deliberately “do what is necessary” to eliminate whatever threat the opposition poses, up to and including “scorched earth” warfare and genocide. The destruction of both human communities and their natural environment continues, the opposition seemingly ineffective against the newest juggernaut.

Things are different in the reign of the Son of Man, the parable promises. As Jesus’ subsequent explanation to his disciples makes clear, in what is now revealed to be a cosmic struggle between the powers of good and evil in the world, the good children of the empire are encouraged patiently to wait out the season of growth and the ultimate denouement of the children of the enemy (those who sowed weeds), in confidence that God’s purposes will prevail at the harvest.  The imperial cycle of violence will stop. True, the image of that harvest is itself violent: “Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (13:42). As Carter observes, ‘the gospel borrows imperial and violent images to depict the final triumph of God’s purposes,” although we might suggest alternatively that as every good gardener or farmer knows, weeds need to be burned to prevent them from regenerating, and ashes help renew the soil. It is nature’s way.

The final judgment marks the end to imperial violence—not replication of it.

What is in view here, in any case, is a final end to imperial violence—not replication of it. As Carter explains, “The evil that is overcome includes all causes of sin, a cognate of the verb ‘cause to stumble/sin.’ These causes include anything that diverts or destroys disciples (5:29-30; 18:6-9) and anything that rejects Jesus rather than recognizing his identity as God’s commissioned agent” (Carter, p. 294).  And whatever the implications of this violent image for the end of the ages beyond the triumph of God’s purposes, the mandate for time forward until God brings the world to fulfillment is to follow the policy of the wise landholder, or Son of Man, namely, to act so as to sustain and to fulfill life as fully as possible, even for those who oppose the purposes of God, and let God bring all things to their appropriate, God-determined end. And as the Son of Man, in our view, is also the Servant of Creation who does what God wills for the entire creation (see our comment in this series on the readings for The Holy Trinity), what God wills for the sake of the “children of the empire,” namely to “shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father,” (13:43) is more likely to be the final purpose of God’s creative activity on behalf of the rest of creation as well, and not its utter destruction, as a literalistic application of the parable’s conclusion might be taken to suggest.

This reading of the parable is strongly supported by the lessons that accompany it. Indeed, the lessons provide a basis for sketching out a theology of creation that fully grounds the reading we have given. The reading from Isaiah is an example of what Walter Brueggemann calls the Old Testament’s “rhetoric of incomparability:”  “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god; Who is like me?” (Is. 44:7). This kind of statement, he notes, comes early in the tradition “and yet is a most sweeping generalization,” so that “we may regard it as the most poignant spine and leitmotif of all of Israel’s testimony concerning Yahweh” (Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, p. 139). The point is not so much that there is no other god like Yahweh (“Israel did not know or care that other peoples made similar claims for their gods.”),  “but that Yahweh really is as said—in extreme form a God of astonishing power and reassuring solidarity” (Ibid., p. 143). Specifically, in this instance. the incomparability concerns God’s ability to know the future he has promised: “Who has announced from of old the things to come? Let them tell us what is yet to be.” This future, strikingly, is the renewal of the land and people together upon their return from exile: “For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my spirit upon your descendents, and my blessing on your offspring. They shall spring up like a green tamarisk, like willows by flowing streams” (44:3-4; not included in the assigned verses). Yahweh is, according to this first lesson, the one to bring about the renewal and restoration of creation envisioned as the culmination of the narrative of the parable. God knows the future, because God creates it (Cf. Isaiah 40:28-31; 45:12-13.)

It is the second lesson, however, that draws our greatest interest here. The second half of the reading, Romans 8:18-25, is what David Horrell, Cherryl Hunt, and Christopher Southgate regard as an “ecotheological mantra text.” The text has come to be cited widely by writers on ecotheology, as they make their appeals for creation care and Christian environmental concern. But the text has received new attention from Pauline scholars without special environmental agendas as well. Horrell, Hunt and Southgate locate a significant change in the weight the passage is given in the interpretation of Romans and in the Pauline literature more generally. “The changing readings of this passage . . . give a clear indication of the way in which the issues and challenges of the contemporary context shape the questions brought to the text and in turn shape the interpretation on the meaning of the text.” The development is similar to what happened to the interpretation of Romans 9-11 when Jewish-Christian relations became a significant aspect of the interpretive context. “Under the influence of a context in which the magnitude of the ecological challenge is increasingly a point of public and political consensus,” these authors write, Romans 8:19-23 “may come to be seen as a (even the) theological climax of the letter.” In their recent book, Greening Paul: Rereading the Apostle in a Time of Ecological Crisis, they devote an entire chapter to the interpretation of this passage, and they carefully weigh the question of whether or not the text can sustain the importance that is being placed on it by ecotheologians (Horrell, Hunt, and Southgate, pp. 69-70).

See the excellent book, The Greening of Paul, by Horrell, Hunt, and Southgate.

In this reader’s estimation, this book is absolutely essential for anyone engaged in our quest for biblical underpinnings for the care of creation, and we therefore present the argument of this chapter is some detail. The key steps in their argument are as follows:

  1. The narrative approach to the interpretation of Paul’s theology, for which the authors present a strong argument in the opening chapters of the book, is particularly appropriate to interpretation of this passage. “While itself brief and frustratingly allusive,” the passage “depends on a certain story about the past, present , and future of creation in God’s saving purposes. Creation ‘is waiting with eager longing’. . , ‘was subjected to futility’. . , in hope that it ‘will be set free’ . . .” (Ibid., p.71; the elided words are the corresponding Greek terms, which we are not able to reproduce here.) The account has “a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it also entails a transformation,” which allows the authors “to construct the outlines of a narrative trajectory, while the employment of [gar] and [hoti] indicates causal links between the elements, thus constituting a plot.” Furthermore, they note, Paul introduced the comment about creation groaning, saying “we know that . . ,” thus apparently “appealing to knowledge that he can reasonably presume his readers share” (Ibid.).
  2. The narrative’s “past” includes some event of “making/founding/creating” the object of which is in a condition of  “current, and presumably prior . . . bondage to decay.” This “creation” has, additionally, “been subjected to futility, of an unspecified nature, not of its own choice, though the subjector is not named.” Bondage and subjection represent “the negative dimensions of its past and present experience, which are transformed with the resolution of the story” (Ibid., p. 72). The “present” is the co-groaning in co-travail of creation and Paul’s community. The “future” anticipated in the longing of creation for the revealing of the “sons of God,” the hearers “who have the ‘first fruits of the Spirit’ and “wait for adoption as God’s sons”, and the hope of creation to be “liberated from bondage to decay” and to “obtain the freedom of the children of God.” Thus, as the authors see it, “the plot looks forward to a final transformation which resolves and surpasses the negative state of decay and futility” (Ibid.).
  3. Turning to a more detailed analysis of key phrases, Horrell, Hunt and Southgate argue that “creation” refers here to “nonhuman creation, whatever precisely is or is not included in Paul’s implicit definition” (Ibid., p. 73).  “Bondage to decay” refers, they think, not to death as the consequence of the Adamic fall, but more comprehensively to the ‘unfolding story of Genesis 1-11, in which corruption affects all flesh. “Subjection to futility” refers, similarly, not to any specific act or cause, but to the fact that “the existence of creation (and of humanity) is futile and frustrated, since it is unable to achieve its purpose, or to emerge from the constant cycle of toil, suffering, and death” (Ibid., p. 77.)
  4. With respect to the present, the creation’s groaning is “a co-groaning with Paul and other Christians and the Spirit, a shared travail that also represents a shared hope, though some aspects of that hope are distinctive to the ‘sons of God,’ who are described here as those who have ‘the first fruits of the Spirit’” (Ibid., p. 79.) The creation, specifically, is “awaiting the revelation of the Christian believers,” and this “unveiling is related to their adoption as sons spoken of in verse 23” (Ibid, pp. 79-80). The “adoption as sons” probably includes “redemption of their bodies” in a resurrection from the dead which in Pauline eschatology is “the initial event in a series that will eventually encompass all creation. . .” The adoption is “important not simply in itself, but insofar as it heralds a wider process of eschatological transformation. The hope that always accompanied the creation’s subjection to futility was and is the hope that the creation itself will be liberated” (Ibid., p. 80-81).

In summary, Horrell, Hunt, and Southgate hold that Paul teaches that an “enslave-too-decay creation has been subjected to futility by God.”  But that it was “subjected in hope” means “that the focus, from the subjection onwards, is entirely forward-looking; there is no description of the act of creation, no indication as to what (if anything) preceded its subjection to futility.” The “co-groaning” and “co-travailing” has been the state of creation since its subjection; the creation is “bound up with humanity and the Spirit in a solidarity of shared groaning, and, similarly, a shared hope” (Ibid., p. 82).

The highlight in Romans is the moment when the groaning creation will welcome the revelation of the “children of God” who will care for creation.

Focused on the “moment of the revelation of the sons of God,” the passage presents “the sons/children of God” as “leading characters, since it is their liberation on which that of creation depends and onto which the hopes of creation are focused.” But of course the character of the story whose presence is “most crucial to the progress of the plot” is actually God, whose actions are “hidden within the force of the so-called divine passives” of the “creation was subjected . . .  will be liberated” (Ibid, p. 82-83.)  Romans 8, the authors conclude, “is a particularly developed and powerful depiction” of the Pauline narrative of “a process, decisively begun yet still to be worked out through suffering and struggle (e.g., Phil 3:10-14; cf. also Col 1:24)” with “its insistence that it is only in conformity to the sufferings of Christ that a sharing in his glory and inheritance is attained (8:17), a narrative in which verses 19-23 so enigmatically include the whole of creation as co-groaning” (Ibid., p. 83).

What strikes us so forcefully relative to the interpretation of the assigned texts for this Sunday is the parallel structure and themes between the narrative of the parable of the weeds among the wheat and this Pauline creation narrative. The unexpected and unexplained seeding of the weeds, the command of the landowner to the servants of the household to desist from destructive separation of the weeds from the wheat, the promised future rescue of the wheat at a future time when the Son of Man will act to end the competition for land by removing all causes of sin and evil; here in a “down to earth version is the narrative of bondage to decay, subjection in hope, and future redemption” in which “children of God” play an important if not a decisive role of bearing hope and assisting the (non-human) creation to its ultimate restoration in Christ. To be sure, the narratives differ in language and accents, appropriate to their narrative settings and social context. But it seems reasonable to suggest that when Paul wrote that this narrative is something that “we know,” it is not difficult to imagine that they knew because Jesus himself had told the story, in different words, at an earlier time.

At minimum, the texts urge us to desist from ecological destruction—now!

What this correspondence might mean for the practice of the Christian church in its care for creation is, of course, another whole discussion. While Horrell, Hunt, and Southgate caution their readers that “there are reasons to be more cautious and careful than much ecological appeal to this favorite text has been,” they find that there are “significant ethical implications” to be inferred from the passage “when its narrative genre is taken into account. . .and when it is related to the wider contours of Pauline theology and ethics,” as they do in the concluding chapters of their book (Ibid, p. 85). We would suggest, for starters, that following the command of the land-owning Son of Man, the ethic of the parable is to desist from the ecologically destructive action of “rooting out” our enemies. Or, expressed positively, we should maintain respect for the ecological integrity of all things. Expressed in positive terms, this conforms well to the ethics of “other-regard and corporate solidarity” as the authors envision it emerging from the Pauline literature (See their chapter 8, “Pauline Ethics through an Ecotheological Lens” pp. 189-220). But for the Apostle, it is more simply a matter of “by the Spirit” putting “to death the deeds of the body” so that one may live. “For all who are led by the Spirit of God—the Lord, the giver of Life”—are children of God . . and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him” (8:13-17).

Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2011.
dennisormseth@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday June 26 – July 2 in Year A (Ormseth)

Righteousness and Justice for All Creation! – Dennis Ormseth  reflects on true prophets.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday June 26 – July 2, Year A (2011, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

Jeremiah 28:5-9
Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18
Romans 6:12-23
Matthew 10:40-42

We disciples make present the Lord, the Servant of Creation.

Welcome is a warm word of hospitality, a word that offers place in which to dwell. Mindful of Jesus’ Easter promise in his Farewell Address to his disciples to “go and prepare a place for you (John 14:3),” we hear this anticipation of the disciples’ outreach with the joyful awareness that we, too, have been prepared to be able to be “home” for these witnesses to the Servant of Creation, in our place, and with them Jesus himself and his Father. That is indeed what Jesus promised them:  “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me” (Matthew 10:40). With those who have been sent out in the power of the Spirit of Life, comes the Servant of Creation and the God of Creation.

 Acclaiming Jesus as King may compromise his role as Servant.

Thus we find ourselves this Sunday gathered for our worship of the God of creation whose steadfast love, according to Psalm 89: 1-2, sustains all generations. What was promised in covenant with David, we are given to understand, is now being extended, through Christ, to all nations. Care must be taken, however, to note the ambiguity inherent in this use of the psalm, lest we welcome a view of God that is subversive for care of creation. In verses excluded from the assigned reading of the psalm, the Hebrew monarch is presented as mediator of God’s gracious presence in and through all creation.

As Walter Brueggemann observes, the psalm reiterates an affirmation of the monarch expressed in 2 Sam 7:12-16, which may “be regarded as the beginning point for graciousness without qualification as a datum of Israel’s life and for the assertion of messianism wherein this particular human agent (and his family) is made constitutive for Yahweh’s way with Israel” (Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, p. 605). But while efforts to qualify the absoluteness of this claim are made in the Old Testament by making the monarch subject to the Torah, Brueggemann suggests that the tension between these commitments is not easily maintained. If “the purposes of Yahweh have now been entrusted to a human agent . . . what is from Yahweh’s side a singular intention becomes complicated both by high aggrandizing ideology and by uncurbed self-service.” For the church, he notes, there is a temptation to “take the high lyrical claims of oracle and royal psalm and ‘supersede’ the narratives of sordidness, so that kingship takes on a somewhat docetic flavor.” Christians appropriate “for Christology the highest claims of kingship and assign to Judaism the demands of the Torah,” which both distorts “the way in which Jewish interpretation kept Torah and messiah in fruitful tension,” and “overlooks the way in which this same tension continues to swirl around Jesus” (Ibid., pp. 609-10).

 The Warrior God (Psalm 89) is opposite to the God who sustains creation (Psalm 104).

The selection of verses from Psalm 89 for this reading nicely illustrates this temptation. The implications of this ambiguity of the psalm’s images of God for our relationship to the creation are significant. The God who “rule[s] the raging of the sea” (89:8), the psalm proclaims, “set[s] the hand” of his servant David “on the sea and his right hand on the rivers” (89:25). As Arthur Walker-Jones points out in his book on The Green Psalter, the images here reflect the continuing influence in Israel of the ancient mythology of the warrior god, who creates by destroying Leviathan, the symbol of chaos, which will compete in the tradition with the more ecologically oriented images of God’s relationship with creation exemplified by Psalm 104 (Walker Jones, pp. 155-57). The relationship of the warrior god to creation is clearly one of domination and control, which is inconsistent with the Trinitarian view of God as relational (cf. Terry Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament, pp. 43-48). The selection of only versus 1-4 and 15-18, serves to conceal this concern from the congregation, but it does not manage to remove from the reading the triumphalist spirit of the monarchical ideology. It also hides the fact that the psalm, taken as a whole, is a lament for the failure of the monarchy to keep the covenant of David, the failure that itself manifests the brokenness of that ideology.

 We welcome visitors who bring gifts—and “baggage”

The presence of Christ as the Servant of Creation, in any case, brings about a decisively different reality. The gospel lesson for this Sunday, we have suggested, is concerned with the extension of the Christian community out into the world, as gatherings of those drawn to Jesus welcome his disciples. We find ourselves amongst those so gathered, and are delighted by the company we share with them around the word of their testimony and we are delighted by the meal that they have taught us to share as a sign of our communion with Jesus in the presence of God. As a congregation, we are of course pleased to welcome newcomers of almost any kind. The growth of a congregation is naturally seen as a sign of success in meeting people’s needs, whether spiritual or social, and perhaps even material. The growth is likely to be credited to the spiritual gifts of the congregation’s leaders and those with whom they amply share these gifts, the local disciples, as it were. Such growth is typically rewarded by heightened confidence in the future of the congregation, greater pride of the members in their choice, and their collective prestige in the larger community, not to forget higher salaries for the staff.

So, at least in a general way, we have some sense for what Jesus is talking about when he suggests that those who welcome a variety of newcomers into their gatherings receive the rewards associated with the arrival and welcome of assorted outsiders. Strangers bring gifts; the disciples bring gifts of word and sacrament, and the blessings that go with them. But sometimes strangers also bring “baggage,” in the metaphor of our times. They bring baggage of different kinds; and the congregation has to deal with that, as well. So we might often find ourselves asking, “what are we letting ourselves in for, as we welcome these newcomers? What, specifically, are we letting ourselves in for, in welcoming these disciples of Jesus?”

 If we welcome prophets, what is the reward?

Jesus suggests a few instructive analogies. First, of special interest to us in view of our discussion about of the character of the monarchy, he says “Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward” (Matthew 10:41a). The trick here is that, as our first reading from the prophet Jeremiah conveniently reminds us, prophets come in different kinds, with different agendas relating to the reigning powers in the land. There are prophets of a rosy future, like Hananiah; and there are prophets of doom, like Jeremiah, who wears the wooden yoke of obedience to Torah. As Diane Jacobsen puts it, it’s a “Case of the Dueling Prophets.”

 Who are the true prophets and who are the false prophets?

At issue is: How can one distinguish true prophesy from false prophecy, a subject taken up in Deut. 18:9-22? Which of us, given a choice, would not choose good news over bad? We will want to believe the bearer of good tidings; and we will tend to dismiss the harbinger of woe. So it was throughout biblical history. The people were wont to choose Hananiah and to dismiss or even to kill Jeremiah.  Jeremiah responds to Hananiah’s smug assurance with the same clear and obvious message as Deuteronomy—time will tell (Jacobsen, p. 115).

 The rewards of the prophets vary, depending on the prophet!

The prophet’s rewards: Hananiah’s promise that the exiles in Babylon will return in two years, irrespective of the people’s disobedience, Jeremiah insists, is a lie; instead, he “has broken wooden bars only to forge iron bars in place of them;” Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon will continue in absolute control (Yahweh has “even given him the wild animals”) until the people turn and repent of their disobedience. The prophecy will end in death, in the first instance, Hananiah’s own. By way of contrast, Jeremiah foresees “days surely coming” when, Yahweh promises, “I will restore the fortunes of my people, Israel and Judah, and I will bring them back to the land that I gave to their ancestors and they shall take possession of it.” Before then, however, the nations will be convulsed with “warfare, famine and pestilence,” as the “fierce anger of the Lord” works itself out and “he has executed and accomplished the intents of his mind” (Jeremiah 30:24).

 Prophecy always embraces all creation—animals, vegetation, land and people.

The prophet’s mention of “wild animals” reminds us that Jeremiah’s prophecy embraces the wide net of all creation. As Terry Fretheim writes in an illuminating essay on The Earth Story in Jeremiah 12:

“God’s purposes in the world must be conceived in relation to the story of all of God’s creatures, including the land. Using Isaiah’s language (65.17-25; see 11.6-9), God is creating a new earth and it will be populated by animals, vegetation, and people (see Hos. 2.18-23). Comparably, the salvation oracles of Jeremiah are remarkably inclusive in their orientation, including non-Israelites (e.g. 3.17; 12.14-17; cf. 29.7) and the land itself (31.5, 12, 14, 27; 32.42-44; 33.10-13; 50.19).

When the trumpet sounds, and God rides the cloud chariots into a new heaven and a new earth, the children will come singing, leading wolves and leopards and playing among the snakes. They will not hurt or destroy, for God will, finally, ‘give rest to the earth’ (50.34; see Isa. 14.7; 51.3)” (Fretheim, The Earth Story in Jeremiah 12, in Readings from the Perspective of Earth, ed. by Norman C. Habel, p. 110).

The reception of Jeremiah’s vision, in sort, will be rewarded with confidence in the restoration of the whole creation.

 Who are the true and false prophets in climate change? Will we listen?

We find ourselves in something of a similar contention between prophecies these days in the debate regarding climate change. Prophets on the right promise peace, with only modest adaptations needed to adjust to the more or less natural changes in climate they foresee taking place in the next half-century. Prophets on the left see instead a doomsday of sorts, climate changes that will engulf whole cities as well as alter habitat for uncounted species. Which prophets do we prefer? Politically it is clear that the American people are choosing the Hananiahs of our time, in spite of the weight of scientific evidence that the prophets of the left have tied around their necks. It is a choice for economic development, over against the restraints of ecologically disciplined policies of sustainable growth.

Economic growth is the Earth-destroying idolatry of our age. And, each year, that choice makes more likely the results foreseen by the prophets of doom. Setting the reputed uncertainties of scientific prediction aside, the church of Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Servant of Creation, will have to decide on which basis the rule of that Servant will be upheld: Will we do what we want? Or will we instead look forward to what God the creator and Jesus the servant of creation will do, and so enlist in their cause? Will we choose a course that follows the imperative of economic growth, or will we turn around and re-vision our future? Those who welcome a prophet, receive a prophet’s reward.

 If we welcome righteous people, what is the reward? Justice for the whole creation!

The second saying, “whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous,” broadens the scope of the discussion of rewards, but with the same results. “Righteousness,” in the Gospel of Matthew, we recall, refers to “actions that are faithful to commitments and relationships.” We welcome Jesus as the one chosen by God to “fulfill all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15). Jesus’ mission embraces righteousness and justice for the whole creation. The reward for those who receive Jesus as the Lord, the Servant of Creation, is re-direction toward the purposes of God for God’s beloved creation. Our second reading, Romans 6:12-23, is relevant here as well: the “righteous ones” are those who do “not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions.” They present themselves “to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present [their] members to God as instruments of righteousness.” In Christ, the Servant of Creation, they belong to the dominion of life for all creation. Those who receive a righteous person, receive a righteous person’s reward.

 If we provide (a cup of) “water” to the poor, will it be polluted or pure?

And so, finally, the special relevance of the third saying: “and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple, truly I tell, you, none of these will lose their reward” (Matthew 10:42).  The phrase “little ones” refers here to the disciples and points, Warren Carter suggests, to their “vulnerability and danger as a minority group. . . . It recalls the context of persecution and exhortation to persevere which is evident throughout the chapter” (Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, p. 245). It suggests to us also those made vulnerable in society by the struggle with the conditions of poverty, for whom a mere cup of water is a precious gift of life. Jesus, we remember, is more than a little aware of the importance of water as necessary to the flourishing, not only of human beings, but also of all creatures. “Water,” as we put it in our comment in the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob, (see our comment on Third Sunday in Lent; cf. John 4:5-42) is “the touchstone of the query concerning the presence of God.”

It probably should go without saying, (but won’t) that to provide the stranger with a “cup of water’ that is beyond proverbial and therefore truly and completely righteous and life-giving, the water will be pure and safe for all to drink, whatever it takes to bring it to the scene. And with that availability, the congregation does indeed, at a minimum, have its reward. As metaphor for the source of all life, furthermore, the cup of water carries astonishingly greater significance: it represents the whole of the creation in its capacity to fulfill the purposes of God, so that all of creation might be freed to flourish in its time. It is indeed a sign of the presence of the Lord, the Servant of Creation. And those who give that cup in the name of Christ, truly, none of them will lose their reward.

Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2011.
dennisormseth@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday July 10-16 in Year A (Ormseth)

The Parable of the Sower as Sign of God’s Provision in Nature – Dennis Ormseth  reflects on the Servant of Creation.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday July 10-16, Year A (2011, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

Isaiah 55:10-13
Psalm 65:[1-8] 9-13
Romans 8:1-11
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Welcome righteous persons, and we welcome Jesus the Servant of Creation!

Welcome and rejection: the lections for the two prior Sundays after Pentecost provided a basis for setting out implications for care of creation of welcoming or rejecting Jesus the Servant of Creation and his disciples. Those who welcome his disciples welcome him: to welcome him is akin to welcoming a prophet like Jeremiah, who rewards the congregation with confidence in the restoration of the whole creation;” it is like welcoming a righteous person, who rewards the gathering with ‘redirection toward the purposes of God for God’s beloved creation;” it is like giving to vulnerable persons a cup of water, which beyond being a precious gift that sustains life, exemplifies the capacity of the creation to fulfill the purposes of God. Those who welcome the Servant of Creation do indeed receive their reward (see our comment on the readings for Time after Pentecost – Lectionary 13).

Exploit creation and we reject Jesus the Servant of Creation!

Those who reject his disciples, on the other hand, also reject Jesus, the Servant of Creation. For what reason might we reject them? Mainly because we are too caught up in the business of the market place to share his concern for the gifts of creation. Or to put it somewhat differently, we are too deeply enthralled by the vision of a ruling power that can effectively dominate and control creation so that we secure and deliver the resources we need to sustain our lives (e.g., our industrial model of agriculture?). In other words, we completely fail to appreciate Jesus’ humble way of exercising dominion as care of creation, and we disregard his offer to provide the divine “rest” that encompasses all of creation.

Sowing seeds yields an abundant harvest.

Today’s readings invite reflection on this dynamic of welcome and rejection at a deeper level; they provide additional perspective on the reasons for and the consequences of these responses. Jesus’ parable of the sower locates the responses in a narrative thick with ecological insight. The sower’s seemingly careless hand distributes seed without regard to the terrain into which it happens to fall: “some seeds fell on the path. . . Other seeds fell on rocky ground…Other seeds fell among thorns. . . Other seeds fell on good soil . . . .” Indeed, one might suspect that this sower is blind, so completely does he appear to abandon his rate of yield to chance. His purpose is accomplished nonetheless! The seeds that fell on good soil “brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty,” which, while not overly abundant, is sufficient for the sower’s purposes. Scholars argue whether or not the yield should be regarded as “superabundant.” Bernard Brandon Scott, for example, thinks the results “are well within the bounds of the believable. They are an average-to-good harvest.” See his discussion in Hear Then the Parable, pp. 355-58). In any case, it is an abundant harvest.

What good may come from sowing everywhere!

With respect to the seed that falls on path, rocky ground, or amongst thorns, the interpretive emphasis is commonly on the failed results. But if one reads with ecological perspective, there are possible advantages to the sower’s casual practice: birds are fed that otherwise might have gone hungry; no doubt stretches of good soil are utilized that might otherwise have been missed; and it is difficult to discriminate between good soil and poor, as one walks through the field. Indeed, could one really tell in advance which soil was really good and not just average, before it gave up its yield? And might there not also be some variation between seeds as well? From the same hand came seed that produced in some of the good soil “a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.” With a sowing so thoroughly characterized by indeterminacy, perhaps there was more purpose in the action of the sower than first meets the eye.

God’s purposes in the sowing will prevail in the harvest.

That is Jesus’ point, in our perspective.  He knows about seeds and soils, obviously, and he appreciates the complexities of their cooperation in producing the yield the sower wishes so devotedly to achieve. His purpose in telling the story, of course, was not to instruct the disciples in agronomy, but rather to give them insight concerning their outreach to others. Appropriate to their call as disciples of the Servant of Creation, their mission is like a planting. They are as seed cast from the hand of the sower—in some places they will meet welcome and in other places they will meet rejection. Even when they are at first well-received and on occasion drawn into deeply fertile relationships, they will produce responses of wildly differing magnitude. But if the yield is not superabundant, in larger perspective the will of the sower will still be accomplished, because the yield will come in sufficient quantities that the hungry bodies in the sower’s household will be fed. The presence of the Servant of Creation will become known, and the purposes of his Father with the creation will be accomplished, in and through the disciples’ encounters on their journey, however often they meet with rejection.

See how God creates the order of creation.

So we are encouraged by this parable to have confidence in the results of our cooperation in the mission of the Servant of creation. And this encouragement is supported by the psalm and by the first lesson that accompanies it in the readings selected for this Sunday. The selected passage from Psalm 65 is all about the relationships God establishes in the world in the course of creating and sustaining it. The God that creates order out of chaos may seem more the forceful monarch who dominates and controls, rather than the relational creator of the Christian Trinity: “By your strength you established the mountains; you are girded with might. You silence the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, the tumult of the peoples” (Psalm 65:6-8). But God is also praised because “you visit the earth and water it; you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it. You water its [i.e., the Earth’s] furrows abundantly, settling its ridges, softening it with showers, and blessing its growth” (Psalm 65:9-10).

The creative action of God is continuous!

Here is relevant background, indeed, for the parable of the sower:  the soil is good because the Creator has taken care in preparing it! And anticipating the results of the sower’s action, the creation flourishes, whether aided by human hands or not: “the pastures of the wilderness overflow; the hills gird themselves with joy, the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain, they shout and sing together for joy” (65:12-13). Thus the creative action of God is continuous; the relational purposes of God are indeed accomplished, with respect to both the creation and its continuing care and development, even to the welcoming of the disciples as followers of the Servant of Creation.

Just look at God’s provision! Earth and people rejoice together!

A similar assertion of divine purpose that is successful over a continuum that includes both creation and salvation comes from Isaiah 55:10-11:

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

Stunningly, people and nature are in this instance seen to join together in rejoicing at the accomplishment of God’s purposes: “For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:12). And equally remarkably, those purposes include not only restoration of the people to the land but also rejuvenation of the land itself, even to the point of the generation of new kinds of vegetation: “Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off” (Isaiah 55:13).

God the Sower will achieve God’s purposes for creation.

Thus far, we note, the parable’s meaning is located entirely within the large frame of the relationship between Creator and creation. If the sower is God, humans are present within the narrative of the parable only as the seed and its yield for the household of God. So also psalmist and prophet rejoice in God’s works for the whole creation. This great frame was perhaps suggested by the author of the Gospel when he noted that Jesus told the parable as he “sat by the sea,” having gone “out of the house” where he had been meeting with his disciples. This is a message for everybody; indeed, it is of relevance for everything, for all creatures. So also, according to the parable, irrespective of the results of individual instances of human interaction, in the end, the seeding of the reign of God will produce yields sufficient to achieve God’s purposes for the creation.

Does the parable of the sower portray the theory of natural selection?

For the contemporary reader, it needs to be acknowledged that another meaning entirely might be drawn from the parable. We have suggested the possibility that the sower is blind and that his sowing is pervaded by indeterminacy. These are hints of an evolutionary reading of the process that would find no basis for attributing purpose in the sowing at all. The parable contains a good share of the elements needed for an argument for the theory of natural selection! The match between seed and soil is largely a matter of chance, and the variation in yields suggests the possibility of superior seed to be selected for the next generation. The yield is in any case readily explained as the result of a complex process governed from the beginning to end by natural process and contingent fact. If the intent was to tell about a ”supernatural” sower and account for the difficulties those who believe in such a being might have in being accepted, the outcome of the story is barely credible.

Especially problematic under such a reading would be the suggestion that so much seed should go to waste, the vexing question of an evolutionary theodicy: if its creator is the benevolent source of all good, worthy of praise by all creation, why is the process of nature so inherently wasteful of possible good? The occasional failure of the entire harvest, under such an indeterminate process, might easily result in famine throughout the land. The question, once raised, quickly escapes the bounds of reflection based on the parable. With respect to our focus on care of creation, we might ask: Why is the possibility of creation’s diminishment in any measure, seemingly built into its very structure?

Rejection of Jesus the Servant of Creation thwarts the harvest.

We cannot pursue this discussion here; see Christopher Southgate’s extended analysis of the problem in his The Groaning of Creation:  God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. We raise the question primarily to note that the lurking in the background of the telling of the parable is an anxiety about the success of God’s purposes in the ministry of Jesus the Servant of Creation, an anxiety that surfaces in the interpretation of the parable that Matthew presents as follow-up teaching of Jesus to his disciples. At fault in the failure to understand “the word of the kingdom,” is “the evil one” who comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path”; or alternately, weakness in the face of persecution causes the initially eager follower to fall away; and “cares of the world and the lure of wealth” choke the initially avid reception of the word.

God’s empire is an alternative to the Roman Empire.

Rejection of the Servant of Creation has multiple sources, and their collective cultural power is strong. In this reading, it should be noted, a door is opened to introduce a variety of other factors:  unmentioned, notes Warren Carter, but important for his interpretation of the parable as a critique of the imperial domination experienced by the sower who is “trying to eke out a living in generally inhospitable conditions,” are “other obstacles: rent, tithes, taxes and tolls, seed for the next year, a household to support. Crop failure meant borrowed money; indebtedness meant defaulting on the loan, loss of land, and virtual slavery as a laborer.” Carter clearly has in mind the oppressive culture of the Roman Empire, which sought to dominate and control all aspects of society, including, we need to add, its relationship to the creation that sustains it. The parable, Carter rightly suggests, “concerns socialization into an alternative culture constituted by God’s empire and in conflict with the dominant values and structures of the surrounding cultures” (Matthew and the Margins:  A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, p. 282, 286).

It is unfortunate, however, that in the context of the parable itself, the birds and the sun have been, retroactively as it were, turned into adversaries of God’s purposes: the bird that snatches away the seed is “the evil one who snatches away what is sown in the heart”; the withering sun is the “trouble or persecution” which “arises on account of the word.” While it may be true that in relatively unknown Hebrew texts there is precedent for viewing birds as ”agents of the devil” (because they are known to eat seeds important for human consumption) the view is heedlessly allegorical and anthropocentric. It leads too easily to the supposition that the creation itself, beyond the human being, has been turned against the will of its creator, an interpretation of the consequences of the “fall”—that is, in the view of recent interpreters of the Genesis text, no longer viable (See Terry Fretheim’s discussion in his God and World in the Old Testament:  A Relational Theology of Creation, pp. 70-89; and Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation, pp. 28-34).

Accordingly, we have double reason to rejoice with the “mountains and the hills before us” as they burst into song, and to clap our hands “with all the trees of the field,” when “good soil” turns up to rescue us, creatures of the dirt that we are, along with all the other creatures, including the birds (Genesis 1:7).  If further reflection on the cause of rejection beyond what has been offered here is needed, the reading for the second lesson from Romans provides a basis for exploring the inner struggle that humans experience when humans are alienated from God’s creation and turn it into an enemy of the Spirit, the giver of life (an orientation to the creation referred to as “living according to the flesh”). Because the eighth chapter of Romans is listed for reading on the next two Sundays, however, we defer discussion of that possibility to our comments on those texts.

Our alienation from creation contributes to our rejection of Jesus as Servant of Creation.

In conclusion, we note that this parable of Jesus, drawn as it is from an agrarian experience of life, implies a culture that is deeply counter to our modern, industrialized orientation to nature. It is the tension between these two cultures that we encounter in every aspect of the environmental crisis of our times: do we live and work and have our being within God’s creation? Or do we seek domination and control of nature, in pursuit of entirely anthropocentric purposes? Naturally, this culture of ours is not receptive to the Servant of Creation or his disciples. We cannot expect it to be, nor can we simply be content to adapt to its destructive power; we must hope for a restoration of the creation by the God who knows and loves it, and be willing to be enlisted in that mission.

Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2011.
dennisormseth@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday July 3-9 in Year A (Carr)

Taking on Rationalization – Amy Carr reflects on donkeys facing war horses.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday July 3-9, Year A (2020, 2023)

Zachariah 9:9-12
Psalm 145:8-14
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

There is both utopic political imagination and Machiavellian rationalization at play in today’s scripture readings. We need the former if we are to minimize climate catastrophe, and ways of reckoning with the latter if we are to enact the kind of collective transformation we need to bring down global temperatures.

On one hand, in our first reading, we have Zechariah’s ludicrous vision of a coming humble king who will exercise dominion while riding a donkey, on whose back he somehow defeats enemies riding mighty war horses. Jesus casts his own authority likewise as that of one who is “gentle and humble in heart, even as “[a]ll things have been handed over to [him] by [his] Father” (Matthew 11:29, 27). The juxtaposition of immense authority and humility is jarring, yet abruptly trust-evoking. Koan-like, the pairing of dominion and humility startles us into a new awareness—a tangible sense of how collective security can be based on mutual trust rather than coercive force.

On the other hand, Jesus wryly observes that “this generation” rationalizes its opposition to the prospect of God’s emerging humility-rooted kingdom by making whatever argument seems to suit the person or the moment: John the Baptist’s calls to repentance are hushed because he was weirdly austere (“neither eating nor drinking”), so he must have “a demon” (Matthew 11:18); yet Jesus’ calls to repentance are ridiculed as hypocritical warnings of a “glutton and a drunkard” because he enjoys “eating and drinking” (Matthew 11:19). Indeed, in every generation, we can be blind about the shifting ways we rationalize a cynical complacency, especially about a call to turn in a radically new direction as a species. We can be tempted to portray every visionary as somehow dangerous or corrupt, and thereby dismiss their message.

If Jesus keenly names the kind of hypocrisy that might drive a Machiavellian will to power, Paul gets at why we might be drawn to going along with those who speak of securing the current order of things, even if we know it’s less than ideal for all. Paul peels back the mask to call out the sheer absurdity of rationalizing our resistance to acting for the common good:

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members (Romans 7:21-23).

Perhaps rationalizations that are rooted in selective, belittling observations of prophetic leaders are themselves a mask for despair about our individual or collective ability to act more justly toward one another and toward creation. We see there is a better way, but we feel unable to pursue it—so we justify our sense of stuckness.

It is precisely this inability that Paul believes is healed by baptism into the corporate body of Christ: “Wretched man that I am! Who will heal me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25a). When we who “are weary and are carrying heavy burdens” come to Jesus for “rest,” and take Jesus’ “yoke” upon us and “learn from” him as  one who is “gentle and humble in heart,” we will “find rest for [our] souls,” for his “yoke is easy, and [his] burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30). To walk in the way of the Torah, to walk with Jesus as the living Word of God, is to be empowered to do that which we cannot do on our own—or when we are addictively in league with the “law of sin” that we express in entrenched, institutionalized patterns of injustice in our lives together.

Taken together, today’s scripture readings testify that a vision of a just and peaceful creation—and the resistance to that vision—are both collectively negotiated. The current climate crisis only intensifies an awareness that the prophets, Jesus, and Paul are calling us not to an individual escape from the tensions of this world, but to living together from the power of peace that cannot be broken by—but can begin to crumble—the powers that sustain collective paths to destruction.

What deeper corporate call to repentance have we ever had than one that asks us to reorient our everyday material world so that we can live more lightly on the planet—so that all species can keep breathing? The call is corporate because it requires wide-scale technological transformation—not simply a collection of individual choices to reduce, reuse, or recycle. Only government policies will enable the particular “monumental shifts historians call ‘energy transitions’” away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. Although the shift is more possible and affordable today than it was ten years ago, we still need $800 billion of “investment in renewables . . . each year until 2050 for the world to be on course for less than 2ºC of warming.” And politicized rationalizations for a failure to invest persist—such as in the decision of the Trump administration to roll back EPA monitoring of air pollution in the name of not overburdening companies amid the pandemic. (Quotes are from “Not-so-slow burn: The world’s energy system must be completely transformed,” The Economist, 5-23-20, https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2020/05/23/the-worlds-energy-system-must-be-transformed-completely).

In the summer of 2020, maybe we can draw ecojustice inspiration from two places we can perceive the Spirit’s breathing today in winds of swift collective change: through our global calls to let fellow human beings breathe, by preventing deaths from the coronavirus whose symptom is difficulty breathing, as well as deaths by racist ways of policing that manifest in unnecessarily suffocating or killing people of color. Responses to both the pandemic and racist police brutality have found expression in a global sensibility. We have watched ourselves transform the texture of our social relations almost overnight through lockdowns and social distancing. We have witnessed a sudden surge in multiracial protests around the world demanding an end to systemic racism—sparked by the humble witness of 17 year old Darnella Frazier using her cell phone to film a Minneapolis police officer suffocating George Floyd.

Frazier is riding a donkey against the war horses of systemic racism in policing, as Greta Thunberg has done against the more invisible resistance of governments to enacting the kinds of rapidly intensive changes in energy infrastructure that we need to mitigate the disaster of climate change. Like Jesus riding a donkey into Jerusalem amid Passover crowds, both Frazier and Thunberg have cheering crowds attending them and the vision to which they bear witness. Both also come up against rationalizations for the status quo, and efforts to dismiss them or their prophetic messages.

The protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, like the 2019 school walkouts for climate change, express an eschatological vision—a glimpse that another way of being is globally contagious and possible, and grounded in a more accurate vision of our shared humanity and planetary condition. We stand with Zechariah in our capacity to behold human beings—and our belonging to creation—without the distortion of a kyriarchical hunger for power over resources and people.

But as Jesus and Paul suggest in today’s readings, those who stand with Zechariah come up against the subtle war horses of minimization and rationalization that prevent meaningful policy changes, be they about the environment, racism, or public health. On these fronts, to take on the yoke of Jesus is to engage in both the humbling inner soul-searching and the persistent collective organizing that address each of these manifestations of sin. Then indeed “wisdom is vindicated by her deeds”—or by her “children” (Matthew 11:19).

Dr. Amy Carr
amyreneecarr@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday June 26 – July 2 in Year A (Mundahl)

Fake News – Tom Mundahl reflects on the alternative.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday June 26 – July 2, Year A (2020, 2023)

Jeremiah 28:5-9
Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18
Romans 6:12-23
Matthew 10:40-42

While there have always been questions about the accuracy of journalism, only in the past few years have charges of “fake news” and adherence to“alternative facts” gained prominence.  This development is chillingly reminiscent of George Orwell’s novel 1984, which begins “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” (Signet Classic, 1949, p. 5). Immediately we recognize that we are entering a world where the very idea of truth is called into question. Instead, everyone lives off-balance in a political culture whose creed is “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength” (Orwell, p. 17).

Linguist Winston Smith soon realizes he lives in a society based on raw power, not truthful information. “Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy” (Orwell, 69).  Even though Orwell’s Oceania is fictional, it is easy to see how much — with the denial of climate science and lies about the danger of the novel coronavirus — it resembles our own. This very question of truthfulness also was central to one of the most dramatic episodes of Jeremiah’s life — his conflict with the prophet Hananiah.

This conflict and its background plays out in Jeremiah 27:1-11 and the entirety of chapter 28. In order to help the assembly to comprehend the appointed First Reading (28:5-9), the lector needs to read this narrative whole or employ a storytelling approach. Because we are once again dealing with the early events leading to the 587 BCE siege of Jerusalem, the focus is on grief, for we are witnessing the end of Judah as a self-determining polity. Terence Fretheim is right in calling this nothing less than God’s mourning a dead child (The Suffering God, Fortress, 1984, pp. 132-136). Into this unfolding grief comes another prophet, Hananiah with news too good to be true.

The essential facts are these: from 604 BCE, Babylon had controlled Judean life, and to demonstrate that power had kidnapped King Jeconiah and “borrowed” precious artifacts from the Temple. This was in addition to demanding substantial annual tribute. By 594/593 BCE, several tribute-paying kingdoms were beginning to consider revolt in the form of stopping these payments of “protection money.” In this context the prophetic word came to Jeremiah instructing him to make an ox-yoke to wear and say to the leaders of nations contemplating rebellion, “Thus says the LORD of hosts, It is I who by my great power and my outstretched arm have made the earth, with the people and animals that are on the earth, and I give it to whomever I please. Now I have given all these lands into the hands of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, my servant, and I have given him even the wild animals of the field to serve him” (Jeremiah 27:4-6). The ox-yoke symbolizes just that servitude.

Into this volatile situation comes Hananiah with a completely contrary message sure to please Judean leaders: “Thus says the LORD of Hosts, the God of Israel: I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon.  Within two years I will bring back to this place all the vessels of the LORD’s house, which King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon took away from this place and carried to Babylon. I will also bring back to this place King Jeconiah….” (Jeremiah 28:2-4a). Who is the true prophet and who is peddling fake news?

Jeremiah responds without a trace of defensiveness.  “Amen! May the LORD do so, may the LORD fulfill the words that you have prophesied…. “(Jeremiah 28:6). But then he goes on to say, in effect, that prophecy is neither wish-fulfillment nor propaganda.  Prophets are sent when there is a need, not as official cheerleaders.  As Walter Brueggemann puts it, “Jeremiah spoke to a people with glazed eyes that looked and did not see.  They were so encased in their own world of fantasy that they were stupid and undiscerning. And so the numbness was not broken and they continued in their fantasy world” (The Prophetic Imagination, Fortress, 2001, p. 55).

By the time a scroll of Jeremiah was available, everyone knew that Jeremiah’s words were authentic; after all, there is no “Book of Hananiah.”  Then why go into the detail of Hananiah’s destruction of Jeremiah’s yoke (Jeremiah 28 :10) and the fact that although he had prophesied only two more years of Nebuchadnezzar’s dominance, in exactly two months Hananiah was dead?  Clements answers, “No doubt many prophets like Hananiah, offering the same spurious appeal, were still known to the book’s readers. Hananiah’s grim fate was to be a warning to them” (Jeremiah, John Knox, 1988, p. 167). There was a price to be paid for pushing “fake news.” When the choice is between power and truth, Jeremiah would concur with Orwell: truth is the loser.

This is well documented in the case of climate science. In July of 1977, James Black, an Exxon senior scientist, addressing a conclave of top scientists at the energy corporations’ New York headquarters, warned that there is a growing scientific consensus that carbon dioxide release is warming the planet in ways that would have profound impacts on the ecosystem (Bill McKibben, Falter, Henry Holt, 2019, p. 72). This was ten years before James Hansen’s testimony before the Senate, often considered the first warning of what was then called “the Greenhouse Effect.” Exxon continued to do research which confirmed these findings. How were these findings used by the richest company producing the most valuable substance on earth? The next year, 1978, one Exxon executive said, “This may be the kind of opportunity that we are looking for to have Exxon technology, management and leadership resources put into the context of a project aimed at benefitting mankind” (McKibben, p. 75).

As we well know, this did not happen.  Instead, looking to protect profits, Exxon, Shell, Chevron, Amoco and others joined forces to form the so-called “Global Climate Coalition,” using their economic power to claim falsely that there was “another side” to a set of scientific findings and research. Essentially, they were following the tobacco industry’s playbook, basing “fake science” on another widespread addiction, this time not to nicotine but to carbon fuels. As we suffer the effects of forty years of relatively unabated carbon emission with the floods, fires, heat waves and diseases of the climate crisis, it is difficult to disagree with McKibben’s conclusion that this is “the most consequential cover-up in human history” (McKibben, p. 73).

Paul writes to make sure that there are no “cover-ups” when it comes to the significance of baptism. Baptism means belonging to a new creation of truth and justice. “No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness (literally, “injustice”), but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness (“justice”) (Romans 6:13). Therefore, “walking in newness of life” (Romans 6:4) provides a communal “crap detector” helping us to discern falsehood. For this is not a mere change of opinion.  As Ernst Kasemann reminds us, “With baptism a change of lordship has been effected” (Romans, Eerdmans, 1980, p. 179).

It follows that the extensive discussion of sin in this text denotes a power that seeks allegiance, not a laundry list of offenses.  As a power, sin lures us to a life of self-sufficient finitude: trust in our own strength, military power, economic growth, and especially technology. As Laszlo Foldenyi suggests in his book, Dostoevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears (Yale, 2020), “The true god of the modern age is technology; we are tremendously, imperially successful, but we have ‘murdered God’ with our ambition. And it is none other than our drive to find an answer to everything. When we began to seek solutions for things for which there are clearly no solutions, this ambition became transformed into hubris” (quoted in James Wood, “In From the Cold,” review essay, The New Yorker, June 1, 2020, p. 65).

Ironically, the same technology that has allowed diverse peoples of the earth to get to know one another, communicate instantly, and cure diseases previously thought of as “death sentences,” has also created the climate crisis and conditions favorable for new zoonotic pandemics. And, the unequal distribution of technology’s benefits has been an important factor leading to the racial roadblock we are experience today.

Not only that, but “progress” in technology carries the risk of changing the very meaning of truth. Instead of the storytelling, poetry, and “community history” genres familiar from the scriptures, new industrial technology produced what Walter Benjamin called information (we would include digital data) as the organizing center of capitalist culture. While information claims to be verifiable, all that is really necessary, argues Benjamin, is that it seems “socially plausible”(The Storyteller, New York Review Books, 2019, pp. 53-54). That low standard has paved the way for propaganda and advertising messages whose only plausibility is the reaction of the message’s recipients. To counter the constant dangers of the waves of media washing over us, the community of faith still remains committed to storytelling, washing, and eating together in the presence of the One who “makes room” for truth that is heard, touched,  shared, and lived out.

It is this sharing which is central to this week’s Gospel Reading. Although Matthew 10 is an extensive teaching block aimed primarily at training disciples, it clearly applies to all people of faith who by baptism share this calling in their own unique circumstances. If Matthew is the “Emmanuel Gospel” celebrating Jesus as “God with us,” we participate in this process by being “with others.” The act of receiving and extending hospitality provides an experience of deep connection. “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me” (Matthew 10:40).  By welcoming others, what could be mere words is authenticated; no “fake good news” here.

This powerful sense of hospitality follows directly from the verse preceding our text: “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life will find it” (Matthew 10:39). The baptismal grace that takes us from the font to the street frees us to “empty ourselves” (Philippians 2:5-11) through hospitality, not only to familiar figures of piety (prophets and the righteous), but to those outside the “lines,” even to the whole of creation. The “reward” is realized not only at the fulfillment of all things, but with the increasing fullness of life diversity brings (Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins, Orbis, 2000, p. 246). This is concretized in the beautiful image — “a cup of cold water” (Matthew 10:42).

Unfortunately, in a divided and warming world, a cup of cold, potable water is rarer than we often think.  Even in rich countries like the US, cities like Flint, MI, and Newark, NJ, have struggled with lead in tap water which will impair children for a lifetime. Time will bring more instances to light, most based on inequity in distribution of resources, often based on race. Similarly, in the so-called developing world, easily available water for drinking and irrigation is a common problem.

At a recent Global Earth Repair Conference, one of the speakers was Rajendra Singh, a medical doctor carving out a successful career. One day Singh was challenged by an indigenous villager who told him that if he really wanted to help the villagers he would “bring them water” (Rob Lewis, “Walking to the Restoration,” Dark Mountain, Issue 17, Spring 2020, p. 7). This farmer went on to explain the old methods of harvesting rains, practices discouraged over a century and a half of the British Raj. Rains were held for use, not with giant dams, but with traditional catchments called johads. “Once held, the water would drain down, recharging aquifers, feeding vegetation and calling back lost weather patterns.” In time, soil health was improved, flooding was moderated, and the regional climate cooled by 2 degrees C. (Was British standard water management “fake news?”)

This is a difficult time for truth. A young playwright, Heather Christian, complained recently, “I feel like we are bombarded with information, but none of it feels right any more…facts don’t carry weight any more. And this, for me, personally, has driven me to the edge” (NPR Morning Edition, June 9, 2020). 1984‘s Winston Smith was also driven to the edge and beyond during his months of interrogation in the Ministry of Truth. But one day he felt a new sense of peace as he unconsciously doodled in the dust of his table 2 + 2 = 5 (Orwell, p. 239).  It was only a short step to total surrender to all that was false. Now, writes Orwell, “he loved Big Brother” (Orwell, p. 245).

There is no surrender as the congregation begins to gather in person around the central symbols of bath, meal, and story, where we discern together what we have called “the word of truth.” The gift is free, yet think of the price paid by Jeremiah, Paul, and Jesus for bearing it. Falsehood, “fake news,” and deception are popular, profitable, and politically appealing. But not among us.

Originally written by Tom Mundahl in 2020.
tmundahl@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday June 19-25 in Year A (Mundahl)

It Can’t Happen Here – Tom Mundahl reflects on prophetic voice and lament.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday June 19-25, Year A (2020, 2023)

Jeremiah 20:7-13
Psalm 69:7-10 (11-15) 16-18
Romans 6:1b-11
Matthew 10:24-39

When I read Camus’ novel The Plague during my freshman year in college, it never occurred to me that I would live to see a global pandemic. Nor did I expect that this novel would describe so accurately our reaction to this “new plague.” Here is Camus providing a picture of how the residents of the Algerian city of Oran first met this brewing disaster.

“Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything was still possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible.  They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views.  How should they have thought of anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views.  They fancied    themselves free, and no one will ever be free as long as there are pestilences” (Modern Library, 1948, pp. 34-35).

Perhaps no culture has been trapped by the illusions of freedom from necessity and exceptionalism as ours. This has not been helped by the ineptness of current political leadership in understanding that the federal government has leadership responsibilities in responding to the novel coronavirus pandemic. There has been a naive assumption of special American “immunity” — it can’t happen here.

But there is a corollary to this magical thinking as we move from political culture to personal life: “it can’t happen here” becomes “it can’t happen to me.” As a parish pastor working with hospice programs, I have witnessed first-hand just how powerful the fear and denial of death can be. From the preference for terms like “passed away,” which now has been shortened to “passed,” to the medical establishment’s preference for jargon like “expired,” it is clear how very frightening it is to say, “she died.”  After organizing several discussion groups on “Death and Dying” and “Grieving Together,” it has even become evident that one of the ulterior motives for being involved with these topics may even be “finding a way out.” It is “one out of one except me.” And, as all who work for ecojustice know, everything we have concluded about the magical thinking surrounding Covid-19 and personal mortality applies to the threat of the climate crisis. It even applies to systemic racism, where despite no racist bones ever admitted personally, people of color die as a result of government action or inaction at a shockingly higher rate.

Jeremiah also struggled against living in illusion. Only for him, illusion had a royal imprimatur and even the appearance of divine sanction. Beginning with Solomon, kings had ignored the Exodus tradition, replacing the “manna” sense of “just enough” (Exodus 16:18) with the economics of affluence and a temple-based religion even Egyptians would be proud of (Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, Fortress, 2001, pp. 31-32).  Building projects, military defeats, the rise first of Assyria, then Babylon, led to religious syncretism which  King Josiah’s Deuteronomic reforms couldn’t quell. It was a time that required prophets.

That living out the prophetic vocation was no easy task is made clear from reading Jeremiah. In fact, making sense of the lament which constitutes our First Lesson requires that the lector do some storytelling, summarizing the human slaughter that went on in the Hinnom Valley (Gehenna), the instructions to break an earthenware jug to show the fate of Judah, and Jeremiah’s arrest by Pashhur, the head of the Temple’s secret police (Jeremiah 19:1-20:6). Only then can this lament make sense.

It is ironic that as part of his call to be a prophet Jeremiah is promised that he will be an “overseer of the nations” (Jeremiah 1:10, Hebrew text). Being arrested by a mere “overseer” of the temple police must have been the last straw (John Bright, Jeremiah, Anchor Bible, 1965, p. 132). No wonder his lament is filled with anger at the One who called him with generous promises, most of which now appear empty. Jeremiah complains that he was both seduced and overpowered, and the results of his work are nowhere to be seen (Jeremiah 20:7). “For whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, ‘Violence and destruction!’ For the word of the LORD has become for me a reproach and derision all day long” (Jeremiah 20: 8).

Still there is power in his call.  Even when he has had enough, he cannot keep from prophesying. Deep down, far beyond any possible level of comfort, there is a barely-conscious confidence that “the LORD is with me like a dread warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble, and they will not prevail” (Jeremiah 20:11).

Yet, there is also power in a royal theology so confident of its unique possession of divine support that it can no longer hear a prophetic voice. Since the regime possesses an “eternal” institutional truth through the monarch, real change is not necessary; it is only a matter of problem-solving and management. It is no surprise that Jeremiah’s “street theater,” using pottery to depict Judah’s future, is unthinkable and cannot be tolerated. It violates an “official religion of optimism” (Brueggemann, p. 37). There is not even a momentary question whether this message might be the word of the LORD. The real problem is Jeremiah, who must be dealt with by a beating  and humiliating time in the stocks (Jeremiah 20:2).

That Judah with its royal theology is unable to hear or see the truth Jeremiah brings cannot help but feel eerily familiar to us. While we claim to have outgrown royalty, the current form of American exceptionalism, mixed with a form of patriotism that claims a perverse form of Christian nationalism as a foundational element, functions similarly to block discussion and action to bring real change.  “Change,” isn’t that what the freighted biblical term, “repentance,” really means?

What stiffens Jeremiah’s audience to reject this turn-around and embrace magical thinking,  preventing them from seeing the way things really are?  Put simply, it is fear of death, the death of the religio-political system they rely on for meaning, economic security, and physical safety. Like all prophets, because he tells an inconvenient truth, he is dangerous.  To them, what Jeremiah’s words and street theater point to can’t happen here.

In the U.S. the results of the global pandemic, the reality of the climate crisis, and the seemingly endless level of racist police brutality threaten a culture based on endless economic growth requiring the exploitation of natural resources and inequality.  Despite claiming to be a culture honoring science, the warnings of epidemiologists (whose work has been underfunded) and even fine science writers like Laurie Garret (The Coming Plague, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1995) and David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, Norton, 2012) have too often been ignored. While acceptance of climate science has grown in the past five years — especially on local and state levels — implementation of policy on the national level has been undermined by the current administration which embraces the “royal theology” of growth at any cost. Similarly, the racial inequality so obvious in the U.S. has been exploited as politically advantageous. As I write, sections of the Twin Cities, my home, are burning.

Like Jeremiah, we ask: why this resistance to truth? Much of the answer lies in our bondage to finding security and identity through possession (cf. Arthur McGill, Death and Life — An American Theology, Fortress, 1987, p. 54).  Whether it is property, wealth, glamour, or intellectual achievement, what we control gives us the illusion of safety and integrity. That is equally the case on the societal level where Gross Domestic Product, a Defense Department budget larger than the next ten countries and necessary to support 800 military bases worldwide, and a massive advertising industry to keep the “consumer faith,” all serve to promote what we have been led to believe is our “well-being.” The results are anything but that — a climate crisis, community and family disintegration, and always the search for scapegoats to bear the blame for the inevitable failure of life lived this way.

So we join Jeremiah in his lament, especially as we consider Psalm 69. Unfortunately, the committee responsible for the Revised Common Lectionary has cut the heart out of this powerful lament.  During this time of pandemic, climate crisis, and racial upheaval, we need also to hear the beginning cry:

Save me, O God,
for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in deep mire,
where there is no foothold;
I have come into deep waters,
and the flood sweeps over me.
I am weary with my crying;
my throat is parched.
My eyes grow dim
with waiting for my God (Psalm 69: 1-3).

Why this need? By sharing in lament, our grief, pain, and the threat of chaos are transformed into language. And as we are reminded by the first creation narrative (Genesis 1:1 – 2:4a), just as God spoke all into existence, so something new and creative occurs when we join our speech and song (Current hymnals may feature a section of “hymns of lament,” e.g. Evangelical Lutheran Worship, pp. 697-704). This communal voice assures us we are never cut off from holy presence. As poet Gregory Orr contends, “words make worlds” (On Being, American Public Radio, May 31, 2020).

It is also important to honor Psalm 69 because traditionally it has been associated with Jeremiah  (James L. Mays, Psalms, John Knox, 1994, p. 232).  Not only does the lament echo Jeremiah’s language, but the details resonate with his experience of being thrown into the “deep mire” (Psalm 69:2) at the bottom of a Judean cistern (Jeremiah 38:6). Cut off from the support of family (Psalm 69:8) and the larger community, he can only look to God’s steadfast love and mercy (Psalm 69:16).

The freedom to grieve and lament together is a gift of shared faith. Without that, humankind is reduced to living by possession as a hedge against anxiety and fear of death. Paul writes to make it crystal clear that “God is the enemy of all life by possession” (McGill, 54). Of course, what is meant here is the power of sin that is washed away by word and water in baptism. In baptism, death, the very reason we surround ourselves with what we convince ourselves that we control, is central.  Paul’s rhetoric shows his sensitivity to just how shocking this is: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Romans 6:3) It is the end of allegiance to empires, whether Roman or the tottering system of contemporary consumer capitalism that seems bent on destroying this green earth. Baptismal faith removes the scales from our eyes to see, yes, it is happening here.

But out of this death comes a share of resurrection that launches “walking in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). As Ernst Kasemann claims, baptism actualizes the cross-resurrection event so that “walking in newness of life” becomes “participation in the reign of Christ” (Ernst Kasemann, Romans, Eerdmans, 1980, p. 168). This changes our fundamental identity and “pledges” our first allegiance to another “community.” Instead of living by possession, we are freed together to live by gift, especially as we are continually recharged by what Kasemann calls “a constant return to baptism” (Kasemann, p. 163).

Wendell Berry describes this more simply in one of his “Mad Farmer” poems, where he suggests “practice resurrection” (The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, Counterpoint, 1998, p. 87). Our Gospel Reading reminds us just how costly this can be. Living by gift, nourishing the earth, and practicing resurrection are guaranteed to bring opposition. It will happen here. This text makes it clear that those who “practice resurrection”will be maligned (Matthew 10:25), will know the division of families (10:34-37), and, as they endure, will know the cross intimately. Yet the promise persists: “Those who find their life (live by possession) will lose it, and those who lose their life will find it” (Matthew 10:39). During this time of pandemic, racial oppression, and climate crisis, lament offers a path to this discovery.

Originally written by Tom Mundahl in 2020.
tmundahl@gmail.com

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Preaching on Creation: Sunday June 12-18 in Year A (Mundahl)

A Community to Serve the Whole Earth – Tom Mundahl reflects on support, endurance, and hope for the challenges we face.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Sunday June 12-18, Year A (2020, 2023)

Exodus 19:2-8a
Psalm 100
Romans 5:1-8
Matthew 9:35-10:8

The arrival of the novel coronavirus has shaken our culture to the foundations. In a matter of a few months, trust in endless economic expansion and progress has all but disappeared. The vaunted American medical system — the “best in the world” — has been unmasked as a disorganized boutique  set of arrangements designed to treat illness among the economically advantaged, not a resilient institution designed to provide public health for all. And the food system with its deadly and exploitative meat processing plants has not only sickened its workers and failed those in animal husbandry; it has led to search for new models.  No wonder we hear discussions of “the collapse complex societies” and how to live through a “long emergency.”

This is all reminiscent of the Epilogue of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, where the now-convicted murderer, Raskolnikov, as he begins his seven years of hard labor in Siberia, dreams that a pandemic plague had killed nearly all humans, leaving those remaining badly shaken. “Here and there people would band together, agree among themselves to do something, swear never to part — but immediately begin something completely different from what they had just suggested, begin accusing one another and fighting….” (New York, Vintage, 1992, Pevear and Volokhonsky, trans., p. 547).

Among the multitude of dangers described by the author and mirrored in our current situation is the shredding of all that binds community.  This week’s readings focus on just that question.  In the face of threats to disintegration: what is the purpose of the faith community and what holds it together?

Too often creation accounts have been dismissed as mere stage scenery providing the setting for what really matters, the historical drama of the Exodus.  Close attention to the Book of Exodus, however, shows how closely creation and liberation from Egypt’s oppression are connected. As Terence Fretheim suggests, “The deliverance of Israel is ultimately for the sake of all creation” (Exodus, Louisville: John Knox, 1990, p. 13). In fact, the harrowing narrative of crossing the sea on “dry land” points directly to Genesis 1:9-10 with its separation of water and dry land.

In fact, what happens at Sinai can only be understood as an affirmation of the goodness of creation, in sharp contrast with Pharoah’s death-dealing use of the Hebrew slaves as mere instruments of production. This suggests that the Sinai Covenant assumes both the coherence of creation’s interdependence and the Abrahamic Covenant (Genesis 12 and 17). What’s more, any new Torah is preceded by a reminder of gracious dealing: “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself” (Exodus 19:4). Just as a mother eagle both prods eaglets to try their wings, rescuing the chick when flight fails, so the Creator may be trusted.

Again, the basis of this echo of the Abrahamic promises, “you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples,” is anchored by creation: “indeed, the whole earth is mine” (Exodus 19:5). But this election is rooted in generous purpose. “You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” ( Exodus 19:6). While the notion of “priesthood” may seem alien to us, it is central to biblical thinking, especially the tradition that the Jerusalem temple is where heaven and earth meet.

More helpful today is the Orthodox view where the role of the priest is to lead worshipers in “lifting up our hearts” to God so that the earth can be transfigured.  As Norman Wirzba writes, “When in priestly motion we lift our hearts to God, what we are really doing is giving ourselves and the whole world to the new creation…so that our interdependent need can be appreciated as a blessing (another priestly function)” (Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, 2nd ed., Cambridge, 2019, p. 264).  As all creation is lifted up, persons may no longer can be seen as mere “machine parts” and the fruits of creation become gifts, not commodities. So even before the Torah is given, we see that “Israel is commissioned to be God’s people on behalf of the earth which is God’s” (Fretheim, p. 212).

Just as all creation is “lifted up” in priestly service, so humankind recognizes that we join the community of all creation in continuous worship. Psalm 100 makes this clear, for as the place of worship is entered, praise is unison.

Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth.
Worship the LORD with gladness;
come into his presence with singing (Psalm 100:1-2).

Here the psalmist reminds us that there can be no worship apart from the sabbath community of interdependent creatures whose highest priestly function is never-ending praise (James L. Mays, Psalms, Louisville: John Knox, 1994, p. 319). This is exactly what happens when the Apostles’ or Nicene Creeds with their creation affirmations are professed.  We commit ourselves as a community to perform in earth care exactly what we confess.

Initially it may seem that nothing could be further from the notion of priestly service than a gospel reading detailing healing and the sending of disciples. But when we recognize the “compassion” Jesus views the crowds with, we see nothing more than a slightly different form of “lifting up.” Those elevated are “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). These are personal problems, to be sure, but also afflictions that cannot be separated from the corruption of the religious elite, the “so-called shepherds,”and Roman oppression of Judea (Warren Carter, Matthew at the Margins, Orbis, 2000, p. 230).

Jesus reframes this as kairos, a time full of opportunity–”the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few” (Matthew 9:37). Without a doubt, there is an element of judgment here that cannot be avoided, judgment of the false shepherds and Roman oppressors. But “harvest” is hardly a time for grim judgment alone; it is a time of nourishment and celebration of a new and different kind of empire.  In a commissioning that foreshadows the final sending (Matthew 28:19-20), the named apostles are empowered to heal and spread the news of the new “imperial order.”  It may seem odd that Matthew’s Jesus limits the mission to Israel. But they are the very ones foundering “like sheep without a shepherd.” Beyond that, as we recall from the First Lesson, Israel is the people called to be a blessing to all the earth, the instrument channeling hope to the nations and the whole creation.

The spirit with which Jesus sends the disciples to participate in this harvest festival of care, is further evidenced by the “easy yoke and light burden” Jesus describes (Matthew 11:29-30). Following the seemingly weighty instruction  to “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons,” Jesus reminds the Twelve, “You received without payment; give without payment” (Matthew 10:8). This new community spawned by compassion, runs on a gift economy.  Just as “the sun rises on the evil and on the good” (Matthew 5:45), so no one earns the benefits of this new creation. For it is as productive as the mysterious seeds which yield ”some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty” (Matthew 13:8), and as generous as the vineyard owner who pays a full days’ wages for one hour of work (Matthew 20:1-16).

Another way of describing living out this harvest festival we celebrate and share, the one we have been welcomed to “without payment” (Matthew 10:8) is “peace with God” (Romans 5:1). Too often, while reading Paul–especially Romans–we forget that he is writing about the same realities that occupy our other readings. “Peace with God,” then, is no pale abstraction. It is a result of having been “made right” with God  and is the active participation in the interdependence and care necessary to maintain the “peace–shalom” intended for all.

Just because believers are welcomed into this community graciously through baptism into the cross and resurrection (Romans 6:1-6) and live this out in worship, learning, and care for creation, does not mean that they will be applauded by the dominant culture. Because this culture tends to idolize competitive struggle for wealth with little or no regard for the fate of “the losers,” opposition is guaranteed.  When sisters and brothers live out their calling to join Native American “water protectors” in protesting building an oil pipeline through the Missouri River, they are classified as domestic terrorists. When teenagers of faith follow the lead of Greta Thunberg and commit to the “school strike” to change views and behavior toward the climate crisis, many adults still believe they should “not waste their time, but stick to their studies.”

No wonder Paul responds to the inevitable opposition of those who find their security in wealth, power, and success with the logic of the cross: “we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us” (Romans 5:3-5a). Despite how successful our efforts to build ecojustice appear, this endurance –another gift–has its source in openness to God’s trustworthy future, a new creation (Ernst Kasemann, Romans, Eerdmans, 1980, p. 135).

As we began this essay, we looked at what to all of us just six months ago would have seemed only a nightmare illuminating the troubled psyche of one Rodion Raskolnikov.  As violent as this  dream was, we could hardly have imagined that we would find ourselves in what may be a multi-year pandemic. But we still can learn from this rich, but troubling novel. For as this young Siberian exile recovers, taking a break from producing gypsum he looks across a river and sees the black specks of the yurts of the nomads of the steppe. “There was freedom, there a different people lived, quite unlike those here, there time itself seemed to stop, as if the centuries of Abraham and his flocks had not passed away” (Crime and Punishment, p. 549).

What was Raskolnikov seeing?  Community. Real community based not on the fevered longings  for personal greatness, but on a deep promise, a promise that enables him to hold the hand of his friend, Sonya, for the first time with assured fidelity.  Although we will depend on the best science to focus on the global problems of Covid-19 and the climate crisis, we equally will need resilient and dependable communities to provide support, endurance and hope.  This week’s readings assure us that this is a gift God’s people can provide.

Originally written by Tom Mundahl in 2020.
tmundahl@gmail.com